What is a Group

A group is a lasting list of people for campaigns. People join once, take part many times, and the decisions stay in one place.

#When to Use a Group

Without a group every campaign stands alone: each time you hand out a password or collect addresses for an address list. A group fits when the same people decide together more than once.

The New group page starts from five kinds:

• House council: one response per flat. You upload the list of flats; residents take their seats
• Organisation: a company, a university or an association, with subgroups. You upload the list of members; people take their seats
• Friends: a few people and one invitation link. Nothing to prove
• Club with applications: people apply with a few lines; an admin reads the card and approves
• Open community: anyone presses Join. Nothing is checked: one person with several accounts counts several times

A kind only fills in the options described below. "Customise" opens all of them, and "None of these" starts from an empty form.

A group is for campaigns. It has no feed and no chat: discussions stay where your people already talk.

#What a Group Has

• Members: a member is an account (a Sui address) that joined the group. Membership has a history: the group remembers when each member joined and left
• An owner and admins: one owner, and up to 50 admins. They let people in, create campaigns and set the rules (see Managing a Group)
• How people join: an invitation link, an application, a Join button, a seat on a list. The ways combine (see Joining a Group)
• Who counts once: the rule that keeps one person, or one flat, to one response. It is set for a whole community (see Who Counts Once)
• A member card: what the group asks its members to say about themselves, such as a name or a flat number. A card exists only in that group
• Campaigns: the campaigns created for the members of the group, with their results and certificates (see Campaigns for Groups)

#Public and Private Groups

A private group hides what it is called and what its members wrote about themselves. It does not hide who its members are: the addresses of members, owner and admins are public on the blockchain for every group. If the fact of membership is itself sensitive, a group is the wrong tool. See Privacy in Groups.

A group can change its visibility later, under Settings:

• Public to private: the new name and description are encrypted, but the old plain text stays readable in the history of the blockchain forever. If that matters, create a new private group instead
• Private to public: the name, the description and the card form become plain text. This cannot be taken back

#Communities and Subgroups

Groups form a tree. A group can have subgroups, and those can have subgroups of their own, up to 8 levels.

• Members count upward. A member of a subgroup is a member of every group above it without joining again. Someone who joined "Tower A" is counted in "Garden Street houses"
• Rights go downward. The owner and the admins of a group can manage every group under it

A community is a top group together with every group created inside it. The top group sets who counts once, and every group inside has exactly that rule. If flats respond in the community, flats respond in Tower A.

A link between two groups needs both sides: the owner of the lower group asks, and an admin of the upper group accepts. A link can be paused: while it is, the members of the lower group are not counted above. See Managing a Group.

#Where Groups Are on the Site

The Groups page has three tabs:

• Waiting for you: campaigns of your groups that you have not answered, and requests that need your decision as an admin
• My groups: the groups you are in, inside their communities, with your role in each
• Find a group: the public groups, newest first. Private and archived groups are not listed

The page of a group has four tabs: Campaigns, Members, Subgroups and About. About shows the description, the visibility, how people join, who counts once, the member card, the parent and the owner. Owners and admins also see a Manage button.

Anyone with the address of a group can open its page. For a private group the page shows a lock in place of the name.

#What a Group Does Not Promise

• Who was let in is the group's decision. Logbook guarantees that the participants of a campaign did not change after the campaign was created, and that no response was altered or added. Whether the right people were let into the group is up to its admins
• A member card is a self-description. Nobody checks what it says
• Membership is public, as said above
• An address is not a person unless the community has a rule of who counts once

#Not Available Yet

• World ID check and email check. "One response per person" and "one response per mailbox of the organisation" need a Logbook check server that is not running yet. The options are shown in the forms, switched off. Joining with an organisation mailbox waits for the same server
• Some of managing a group through an agent or the SDK client. The MCP tools and LogbookClient create, join and leave groups, handle invitations and applications, remove members and answer campaigns of groups. They do not do the transfer of a group, the appointment and removal of admins, the tree of groups, a list of seats, the settings of a group, archiving or deleting: those are done on the site (the SDK exports the building blocks for developers, see API & SDK)
• Notifications. Nothing notifies a person that they were invited, appointed or approved: send them the link yourself

Like everything during the beta, groups live on Sui Testnet, which can be reset (see Beta Testing).