Groups as an integral part of Sakai

Groups are an integral part of Sakai and since they are pervasive across the system they are also challenging to get our heads around.  There are activities around creating and managing groups and there are activities around what you want to do with and within groups - basically the reason you created the groups in the first place.  It is important that the context of the latter be considered when designing the UX for the former.  Groups allow us work collaboratively and in conjunction with each other which is the core reason for using a product like Sakai.

Types of Groups

Formalish

• Course and section groups
  • Course and Site Structure Patterns
• Departments, Schools, etc.

Ad-hoc

• Project groups
• Research groups
• Special interest groups
• Work groups (i.e. my department)
• Portfolio groups (i.e. groups that have access to my work in a variety of ways - reviewers, evaluators, recruiters...)
• ...

Group Membership may come from:

• The world - people I know, people I can find, people my people know
• within my institution
• within a constrained set of institutions
• within my department
• within my current context (i.e. class, portfolio)
• within any bounded group (i.e. subcommittees of our environmental stewardship committee)
• third party system
• ...

Group Contexts and Information Architecture

A community contextdecides what groups, people, membership types, etc., you're most likely to be interested in at a given moment. When you choose people, the context decides which people you usually see: not everyone in the universe, not everyone in the university, but everyone in this context. When you look at named lists of people, the context decides which ones you usually see. When you want to create a new named group of people or new categories of groups, what you create most likely stays within this context.   More on Community Contexts...

 http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/GROUPS/Community+Contexts

User Scenarios

We've identified several areas of interest around groups.  In an attempt to keep this document digestible, we have a conceptual model page for each of the following areas:

Viewing
Finding
Collaborating
Sharing
Creating / managing

References:

• Context Scenarios (Group creation & management)
• Examples of groups in higher education
• Learning Capabilities Spreadsheet
• Fluid Personas

• Federated Authorization Use Cases
• Sakai 3 Groups BenchmarkBenchmarking - Comparing how other systems deal with groups