Sharing Your Space
Making a fancy Space for what you need is all well and good, but sharing that Space is at the heart of Querki. Most of the time, you want one or more other people to work on it with you.
So -- let's say that I want my friend Martin (who owns the Game Night Space) from the previous chapter to work with me on my LARP. From the Actions menu, I choose "Sharing":
and I get the Sharing page:
This page lets me invite people into my Subway Game Space, and control what they can do in it.
To begin with, I write some quick invitation text in the box near the top. This doesn't have to be long, but it should describe what the Space is for the people who I am inviting into it:
Below that, I can invite people by their email addresses. I type in an email address:
I press Enter (or comma, so that cut-and-pasting a comma-separated list of email addresses works), and it shows the email address that I've typed:
If I mistype anything, I can click on the "X" next to an address to delete it.
Instead of inviting people by email, though, it's often easier to invite them by name. If you want to invite a collaborator -- someone you know from another Space -- you can simply invite them by their Display Name or their handle. So I begin to type Martin's name into the Collaborators box (below the email box):
As usual, Querki prompts me with anyone it knows who fits that name, so I can simply press Enter to accept the prompted name:
The next question is which Role I want to invite people as. Roles are Querki's simplified security mechanism. As discussed under Advanced Topics, Querki has extremely fine-grained security -- that's very powerful, but often very inconvenient. So it also defines several Roles, which are quick ways of saying what this person can do in this Space. (As the Owner, I can always do anything I want in my Space.)
The Default Role shows up just below the Collaborators:
The Default Role is the Role we are assigned to the people we are currently inviting. If I click on that, it turns into a drop-down:
And if I click on the drop-down again, it shows all of the available Roles:
At the moment, there are five Roles defined in Querki. Each has all the capabilities listed above it.
- The Basic Member Role means that these people have access to this Space, but nothing else. It is most often useful when you are creating a private Space (that the general public can't read), but you want to be able to invite specific people who can read it. But basically, a Basic Member can only do what you've allowed all Members to do.
- The Commentator Role allows these people to read and write Comments in Conversation, and to contribute User Values such as Ratings.
- The Contributor Role means that these people can create and edit Things in the Space.
- The Editor Role means that these people can Design Models in the Space. (Later, it will also allow them to moderate Conversations and contributions from non-Members.)
- The Manager Role doesn't do anything special yet, but it will later allow these people to do most activities that only the Owner can currently do, such as inviting people into the Space.
We will eventually allow you to define your own Roles for your Space, but these predefined ones work pretty well for most cases.
In this case, I decide that I want Martin to be able to help out a lot, so I click on the Editor Role:
Finally, I click the Invite Button to actually send the invitation email:
Note that you can invite a number of people at a time. (Please keep it to only about ten at a time for the moment, though, and keep in mind that there is a limit to the number of people you can invite into any given Space.) You don't have to invite everyone at once: you can come back to the Sharing page whenever you need to invite more folks. Querki will remember the invitation text and the Default Role for next time.
While I'm waiting for Martin to receive his invitation, I can refresh the Sharing page and see that he now shows up under Outstanding Invitations:
At any time, I can change my mind about Martin's Role by clicking on it:
Shortly, Martin should get the invitation email, containing the text I wrote:
After he accepts that, the Sharing Page will now show him as a Member of this Space:
One last note: as mentioned earlier, remember that you can invite anyone into your Spaces, and this makes them Invitees in Querki. They should eventually be granted Full Member status, with the ability to create their own Spaces, but it may take a while.
