Communities of Practice for Public Service

The Admin tab is a new element to www.communities.idea.gov.uk it brings together most of the facilitation functions into one place.

Once you have selected the Admin tab you will see three elements, manage your community, community logo and facilitator tools

Once you have selected Manage community facilitators you are able to appoint up to Eight facilitators to the community.  All facilitators must already be members of the Community of Practice for local government platform

To update the lead facilitator select the lead facilitator link on the right of the screen this will take you to the community settings page.  Select from the drop down list of the lead facilitator

And select Save changes

Please note that the Lead Facilitator will be contactable from the communities tab by the CoP platform message system, when a member is searching for a community.

Community facilitators have the ability to create three accept and three reject messages for when they receive community membership requests. This will allow facilitators to select a specific membership acceptance or rejection message for membership requests.

Setting up accept and reject messages

Click on the admin tab within your community and then on ‘Manage membership requests’ and then ‘Custom membership emails’. You will then get to this page.

As you can see on the right you then have the option to add an accept or reject message. If you click on either of these links you will get the page below where you can write your acceptance or rejection message.

Remember to save any changes.

Then when you get a membership request and chose to accept or reject a person you will see a page similar to the below where you have the option of selecting one of your prewritten accept or reject message. Then click Go.

Communities of Practice have a facility for creating a personalised list of websites that will enable more focussed and relevant search results to be returned for their particular domain of interest. Firstly you will need to select Yes on the radio button called Search selected websites within the Community Settings in the Admin tab to activate the search for members.

You can use this search by selecting the Selected web sites radio button.

Please note that you must set up a searchable website before this option is viewable. By selecting Edit search sites under the Facilitators tools on your Home Page

 Edit search sites for the Personalised community search

To add a website to your website list select Manage search site list. 

And select Add a new site on the right hand side

You can add up to a maximum of 20 sites 

Complete the Name, Site and Description and select Save changes

This new site will appear in your Edit Search Sites page

You can add up to a maximum of 20 sites 

After you have selected Membership settings a new screen will appear called Membership settings for this community.  Membership settings has many elements that can be changed; we will go through these one by one

Facilitators

You are able to appoint up to six facilitators to the community.  All facilitators must already be members of the Community of Practice for local government platform

You can also update the lead facilitator see the manage your community section

Auto registration

You can allow people from specific email domains to join the community without approval. e.g. idea.gov.uk. 

Add more members

As the community facilitator you have the option to add more members.  This is useful when creating a sub-community as you are able to add members to the sub-community without the members working through the registration process. By entering their email address with a comma space between them and select Save changes, members will automatically be a member of the sub-community.  Please not members must be registered on the Communities of Practice for Local Government platform first

You can add more members do your community.  They must be registered on www.communities.idea.gov.uk.  Please note that they will not receive a notification that they have joined the community.

The New Sub-community link is only available to facilitators of the community.  This will take you through a six stage process to setting up a sub community.  The stages include:

1. Start
2. Eligibility
3. Responsibilities
4. Contacts
5. Community
6. Submit

After submitting the electronic form you will receive a notification email notifying you that your sub community application has been sent to the system administrator for approval.  You will receive notification is the application has been successful or declined from the system administrator.

Delete this community is a new function for the facilitators.  All communities will have a lifecycle, some will last for years others will only have a short life. 

Before deleting a community something to consider as all information that exists in the community will be deleted and will not be able to be recovered.

• Notify members that the community will be closing
• Save any relevant material from the community.
• See if any other communities would like some of the material.
• Find somewhere to host the legacy materials.

To delete the community select on the Delete this community link

You will need enter a comment and your user ID will be help in the database if a request for why the community was closed is received.

Once you select on the Delete button you will see this message

Blogs

You can delete any blog post made by any of your community members to your community. To do this view the particular blog post then on the right hand side of the page select 'withdraw from this community'. That blog post will be removed from your community

Forums

You have a few options when it comes to moderating the forums. These include:

• Editing a forum post
• Delete this entire topic
• Delete this response
• Mark topic sticky
• Close this topic
• Theme the topic

You should only edit or delete a response if you believe the post infringes the Forum etiquette as stated in the Terms and Conditions or if you need to correct text or spelling that could confuse members. 

How to edit a forum post

First you must select a forum posting then by selecting edit this will give you the option to edit the post.

You can moderate the post in the same ways as an original forum posting.  

Alternatively you can delete this entire topic.  You can only Delete the entire topic if you select the original posting.

Delete this response

To delete a response select edit on the response that you wish to remove

You will now have the option to Delete this response

Mark topic sticky

Assigning 'sticky' status to a forum thread means making it so that the thread always appears at the top of the discussion forum in the community. You can assign sticky status to more than one forum thread.

To do this select Mark topic sticky

A new icon will appear on the topic title

And will show on the latest forum Topics

To remove the sticky marker select Remove sticky marker

Close this topic

Close this topic is especially good when running a hot seat, expert in the chair or a time limited discussion.  To close a topic select Close this topic

A new icon will appear on the topic title

And will show on the latest forum Topics

To re-open the topic select Re-open topic

Theme topics

If you have set up themes in the Admin tab you will be able to allocate themes to the forum topics.

All members of the community can allocated a theme to a forum posting and can amend the theme if they started the forum topic.

As a facilitator you will also be able to amend the theme for any member's forum posting.

When starting a new topic to allocated a theme please use the drop down box to select a theme.

P.S You do not have to select a theme when posting a Forum topic

To edit a theme

Follow the same process for editing a forum posting, where you will be able to change the theme drop down.

Events Calendar

Three options are available within the Event Calendar; you must first select an Event Calendar posting before the options become available.  Under Tools, you will see Add a new event, Edit this event and Delete this event

After you have selected Edit this event you are now able to make any amendments and Save changes at the bottom of the screen

Delete this event.  When you have deleted an event you will have the option to return to the events list

Two new features of the event calendar are the ability to add an attachment when creating the event. People can also now comment on an event posting, this may be useful if people are to express an interest in attending this event.

Library

Under Tools, you have a few options, these include:

• Add a new entry
• Edit this document
• Delete this entry
• View library by theme
• Subscribe to email alerts for this document

Adding themes to entries in the Library

To add a theme when adding a new entry please select from the drop down list once you have set up Themes in the Admin Tab.

Edit this entry

After you have selected Edit this entry you are now able to make any amendments to the library entry including the title and description.

If you wish to add a Theme to a previously upload item in the Library, select the edit this entry and using the tick boxes select the themes that you wish to have associated with the item.

Please note that you are able to have more than one theme associated with an item.

Delete this document.  When you have deleted a document you will have the option to return to the document library.

Wiki

New wiki functionality includes two new tabs at the top of the wiki called 'History' and 'Discuss'. In the 'History' tab you will be able to see the history of the changes and who made them (like usual but in a different page). In the 'Discuss' tab you will be able to make any comments about the wiki that you may not want in the main article.

If you are going to delete a wiki make sure if it is important information that you capture it in a different format e.g. a document.

News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines in one place, as soon as it’s published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Adding news feeds

To add new news feeds in the News feed tab.  You must first find a relevant news feed. Most website use this logo  to direct you to the web site address that can be used for the news feed

Copy and paste the web address into the lower box and copy and past the name of the news feed in the top box e.g. BBC News and selecting Subscribe

Facilitators of communites now have the ability to edit their community welcome text with all the functionality of the normal CoP inline editor. This means that facilitators will have the ability to easily add in hyperlinks, images and even video clips into their community welcome message.

Editing this text can only be done after the community has been created and when setting up the community people will need to enter the welcome text in the normal way. Once the community has been set up facilitators will need to click on the admin tab then ‘Manage welcome text’ (on the right under Facilitator tools).

You will see this:

Just make the changes and click 'Save'.

Google Analytics gives you a rich insight into your website traffic, shows you how people found your site, how they explored it with easy-to-use features to let you see and analyise your traffic data in an entirely new way.

Please note: only one facilitator can set up Google Analytics for the Community.

But once it is set up you will be able to allow other facilitators to access

First you will need to set up an account in Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/

If you are a first time user select Sign up Now

And Sign Up

• Add the URL from the Home Page of your community to the Website URL e.g. http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk/c/xxxxx/home.do
• Add the name of the community in Account Name
• Select Time zone
• Select Continue

• Add your last name
• Add your first name
• Country or territory
• Select Continue

• Select Yes to agree to T&C’s
• Select Create new Account

Select and Copy the code that starts with UA from the Paste this code.

e.g. UA XXXX XXXX-X

• Go to the Admin tab of your Community
• Select Community Setting
• Paste the UA code from Google Analytics into the Google

Go back to Google Analytics and Select Save and Finish.

Please note: It will take between 12 and 24 hours before Google Analytics will becomes active.

The report will show a tick when it has become active.

How to add additional facilitators to the Google Analytic Report.

• Select Edit on the right hand side
• And scroll to the bottom of the page

• Select Add User

Enter the email address of the facilitator(s) and select Save Changes (Please note you will need an account that is linked to Google.)

If you need to know more about Google Analytics please use the help Link http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en_US

If you are a facilitator for public communities you now have the option to allow outgoing RSS feeds from the Forums, Events, Library items, Wikis and Blogs.

Once you set up the Public RSS feeds this will enable it for all the above functions. 

To set up the Public RSS feed select the ‘Admin’ tab and then ‘Community Settings’. On the resulting page about half way down you will see the image below assuming it is a public community.

Then select the Yes radio button and save the changes.

To use the Public RSS Feed select Public RSS feed in the functionality you wish to use such as the Forum, library etc. It will look like:

Once you have selected Public RSS Feed you will be taken to a new page where you can select which RSS reader to use or take the URL and paste this into to your RSS Reader.

Before you allow this function within your community I would recommend notifying your members.

Changing the library to a folder strcuture from a theme structure

We have introuduced the ability convert your community library theme strcuture to a folder structure. For some the ability to theme to one level is not totally satisfactory and it may be useful to use a folder structure where there is a better and more easily navigate heirarchical structure.

So now where themes have been set up there is an option (for facilitator) to convert to a folder structure just by clicking on ‘Convert library to folder style’. See below under Tool.

The resulting page will look something like this: 

Theres are three new options when you have converted to a folder structure: 

View tree – this allows members to get a quick snapshot of the folder heirrachical structure without having to go to click into a folder.

Create folder – allow the creation of new folders by facilitators only

Move – Allows you to move a folder to another folder

You will also get the option to switch back from this folder structure to a theme structure if you prefer. Just click ‘Convert library to folder style’. This will convert this Library from the hierarchical folder style to a flat one level themed style. A theme with the same name will be created for each of the existing folders