On mozillians.org, Mozilla’s community directory, there are hundreds of self-organized groups of people based on a variety of interests. The Community Tools team has released some big improvements for how you can create, manage and view groups in order to provide more value in connecting with fellow Mozillians.

New ways to curate groups

Starting today, all new groups will have a curator, which is the person who created the group. The curator has the ability to set the general information of the group, manage some settings and moderate the membership of the group.

The general information on curated groups now includes the fields that have been shown on functional area groups for a while. These fields include a description, IRC channel, website, and wiki page. The group curator can also decide if the group is accepting new members by default or only by request.

In the past, users created groups simply by typing words into a field on their profiles. Now, users create groups from the groups page.

If a group is set to accept new members by request, users can request to join the group and the curator will be able to manage those requests from the group’s page. Also, daily email notifications will be sent out to let the curator know when there are membership requests. Curators are able to filter group members to quickly see who is in the group and who has requested membership.

All the groups previously created still exist, and users can join and leave those groups freely.

Give it a try

I’m excited to see how Mozillians will use the new functionality for groups. You can create a new group from the [Browse Groups] page. Please file bugs for issues and enhancement ideas. If you have questions or feedback, please post on our discussion forum or stop by #commtools on IRC.

http://dailycavalier.com/2014/02/mozillians-org-groups-now-have-curators-and-other-goodnesss/