Creating subcommunities

Create a subcommunity when you want to bring together a subset of members within an existing community.

Before you begin

You must be a community owner to create a subcommunity. When you create a subcommunity, you and any other community owners automatically become owners of that subcommunity. The subcommunity has exactly the same functionality as the parent community; you can edit it, add widgets, and perform the same actions in it as you can in the parent community.

About this task

Creating subcommunities is a useful way of organizing your community members into smaller groups with different areas of focus. By creating subcommunities, you can share information and collaborate with a more targeted selection of people while maintaining the goals and objectives of the parent community. You can add as many subcommunities as you like to a community.
Note: You cannot create nested subcommunities within a community, and you cannot add an existing community as a subcommunity of another community.

Procedure

To create a subcommunity, complete the following steps.

  1. Log in to IBM® Connections and open the community to which you want to add a subcommunity.
  2. From the Overview page, select Community Actions > Create Subcommunity.
  3. Required: Enter a name for the subcommunity in the Name field.
  4. Enter one or more tags in the Tags field.
  5. To generate a web address for your subcommunity, enter a one-word, unique term that identifies the subcommunity in the Web Address field. This field displays only if you have a Web Address entry in the parent community. If you do not want to create a web address, ensure that you leave this field blank.
    Notes:
    • Certain keywords with a technical meaning, such as html or atom, are reserved and cannot be used in subcommunity web addresses. If you enter a reserved keyword, an error message is displayed, and you are prompted to enter a different keyword.
    • If your web address contains a non-alphanumeric character, such as an ampersand (&), you must escape the character by using a forward slash ( / ) before the character.
    • If you do not see the option to create a web address for your subcommunity in the user interface, this means that your administrator has disabled this option for your organization.
  6. Required: Specify the level of access that you want for the community. The access options available depend on the access level of the parent community.
    • When the parent community is public, the subcommunity can have public, moderated, or restricted access.
    • When the parent community is moderated, the subcommunity can have moderated or restricted access.
    • When the parent community is restricted, the subcommunity must also have restricted access.
  7. Add members to the subcommunity by doing one of the following:
    • To add a subset of the parent community membership to the subcommunity, enter the names of the people that you want to add in the field provided.
    • To add all the members of the parent community to the subcommunity, click Add all members of this community to your new subcommunity.
    Note: To be a member of a subcommunity, a person must be a member of the parent community.
  8. Enter a description for the subcommunity in the Description field.
  9. To upload an image for the subcommunity, click Upload a Community Image and browse for an image.
  10. To apply a different theme to the subcommunity, click Change Community Theme, and select a theme.
  11. If moderation is available and editable at your site, you can select from the following options:
    • Owners must approve all content (widgets) where widgets might be one or more of the following widgets: blogs, files, or forums. When this option is enabled, community owners can review unpublished content that has been submitted for approval and decide whether to publish it to the community or reject it.
    • Viewers can flag inapproriate content (widgets) where widgets might be one or more of the following widgets: blogs, files, or forums. When this option is enabled, community owners can review content that has been flagged as inappropriate by other users, and decide whether to keep the content or remove it from the community.
    For more information about moderation in communities, see Moderating community content.
  12. Click Save to save the subcommunity.

Results

Your subcommunity is created as a child of the parent community.

A Subcommunities link is added to the navigation sidebar in the parent community to enable you to open the subcommunity from the parent community. You can also access your subcommunities from the I’m a Member or I’m an Owner views.

What to do next

You can add content, edit, customize, delete, and follow subcommunities, and work with them in exactly the same way that you would a regular community.

If you are creating multiple subcommunities within a community, consider adding the Subcommunities widget to the parent community. This widget allows you to see all your subcommunities at a glance and navigate easily to them from the parent community.




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