What a group is for
A class project, a club, a team, a research group. Anything with more than one person and more than one repository's worth of work.
Groups are the answer to "where does our team's work live". Without one, stacks belong to whoever created them and nobody else can find them by browsing.
Making one
Go to Groups and fill in the form. A group needs:
- A name, which is what people see.
- A slug, which is what goes in the URL. Letters, numbers and hyphens. Your group lives at /g/your-slug.
- A description, optional but worth writing. It appears on Explore.
Whoever creates the group is its owner.
Roles
There are three, and they mean exactly what they say.
- Owner - everything a maintainer can do, plus adding other owners and featuring the group on Explore.
- Maintainer - can add members and move stacks into the group.
- Member - belongs to the group and is listed on it, but cannot change who else is in it.
Every one of these is checked on the server, not just in the interface. A member cannot add themselves as an owner by any route.
Adding people
On the group page, owners and maintainers see a Manage panel. Type someone's handle, pick their role, click Add. They have to have an account already, which means they have already proved a university email address.
Moving stacks into a group
Moving a stack needs two things at once: you must own the stack, and you must be an owner or maintainer of the group. Neither side can be claimed unilaterally, so nobody can pull your work into their group and nobody can dump work into a group they do not help run.
Getting featured
An owner can feature a group, which puts it on Explore alongside featured stacks. It is limited to owners so a group cannot be turned into a billboard by any passing member.
Featuring is a good idea when the work is worth showing: a finished class project, a club that wants members, something you would send a professor a link to.
Groups and privacy
Groups organize and attribute work; they are not an access control system yet. Anything on Branchwork is visible to signed-in members of the university. If you are sitting on something genuinely sensitive, do not put it here until we ship private stacks, which is on the roadmap and not done.