Organisations
An organisation is the body that looks after groups: an association, a shelter, a municipality. It holds a name, a description, a website, a logo and a registration number.
An organisation does not own its groups
A group is affiliated with an organisation rather than contained by it, and the difference matters on the day it stops being theoretical.
- A group can be affiliated with several organisations at once.
- It can change organisation over time, or have none at all.
- Deleting an organisation leaves its groups untouched. Associations dissolve; the animals they looked after are still there, and so is their record.
Think of an organisation as a label a group carries, not a folder it sits in.
Affiliating a group
Affiliation needs the agreement of both sides:
A manager of the group and a manager of the organisation both have to agree. When one person holds both roles, their single action is enough.
In practice that means one of three things happens:
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| You manage both the group and the organisation | The affiliation is made immediately |
| You manage the organisation but not the group | An invitation goes to the group, to accept or decline |
| You manage the group but not the organisation | A request goes to the organisation, to accept or decline |
Ending an affiliation
Either side can end it alone. The coordinator of the group, or the coordinator of the organisation, can withdraw at any time without the other's agreement.
This is deliberate: joining should take two, but nobody should stay tied to an organisation that has stopped answering.
Membership grants no access, except the calendar
Being part of an organisation gives you nothing over its affiliated groups. Not the animals, not the entries, not the location. To work with a group you need a role in that group, given by somebody who can grant it.
The one thing an affiliation does open is the calendar: the organisation gathers the calendars of the groups affiliated with it, which is what lets a body coordinate groups it does not run. It is the calendar and nothing else, and it stops when the affiliation ends.
This is the opposite of what tools like GitHub do, and it is on purpose: a colony's location in the wrong hands is a risk to the animals themselves, so widening access is always a deliberate act. See People and roles.
The calendar
An organisation has a calendar of its own, for its governance appointments, and it also gathers the calendars of the groups affiliated with it. An entry on it belongs to the organisation and to no group, and a group's entries appear while the affiliation is accepted. Ending an affiliation takes that group's entries out of the calendar with it.
A coordinator or a manager of the organisation writes its entries, and anybody with a role over it reads the calendar. From the organisation's screen you can also Download calendar, or subscribe to it from the application you already use. See Calendar feeds.