Facilitators

Suggested text for accepting a new member into a Community of Practice this text can be edited as appropriate

Suggested text for rejecting a membership application to a Community of Practice/asking for more information this text can be edited as appropriate

 Top tips for facilitators on encouraging contributions from members

Instructions to prospective members on how to register and join your Community of Practice a document you can email to prosepctive new members - edit as appropriate to include the correct url of your community

Instructions to prospective members on how to register and join your Community of Practice - copy and paste the content of this document into an email to send to prospective members - edit as appropriate to include the correct url of your community

Facilitators of communities on the IS/IDeA site get a facilitator tools menu which standard members do not. You can find this when you are logged in to the IS/IDeA community site under My Home, in the middle of the right hand side of the page. This menu, with instructions and screen shots, is available to download. Alternatively, the instructions are below.

Facilitators Tools menu

The five options that facilitators get are:

View Metrics
New sub-community
Community Settings
Membership Requests
Edit Search Sites

Facilitators can also expel members from the group by clicking on the member's name, and selecting "Expel member". You can choose to send them a message if you like.

View Metrics

Select this option to see summary information on the activity in your community. You can choose to periodically share this information with your group, and you may wish to perhaps use it to assess the effectiveness of your group.

New sub-community

You may decide to create a sub-community, perhaps for steering group members, or people working on a sub-task. Note that any sub-communities requests will have to be approved by the Improvement Service. We suggest you discuss your requirements with us beforehand.

Community Settings

In this section, you can edit all the settings for your community including the explanatory text that is listed with all the communities, the welcome text for your members, the features, the key words, etc. We recommend you do not change your Community name.

Clicking on "Export list to spreadsheet" gives you a spreadsheet of all members of your community with contact details, email address, joining date and last login date.

"Membership Settings" enables you to add or change facilitators, allow people with a specific email domain (e.g. @falkirk.gov.uk) to get automatic membership without approval, and to manually add members to the group by inputting their email addresses (though they must already be registered on the IS/IDeA site for you to be able to do this).

Membership Requests

"Membership requests" lists the people who have applied for membership to your group who have not yet been approved or denied access (please see the document 'Approving or denying membership to a Community of Practice' for instructions on how to do this). An email notification goes to all facilitators when someone requests membership, and once a facilitator has approved or denied an applicant membership, that name disappears from the list. (NB. If you wonder who approved membership to a particular member of your group, you can view their profile and at the bottom of it - it says who approved their membership.)

Edit search sites

Use this to add sites that your members might find useful sources of information when they are looking for help and pointers. Adding new sites is simple and you can add up to 20. When your group members use the Search tool, it will also search the whole of these sites along with your group's content.