699630 - Allow group owner to invite others to join a group

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1246665

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, enhancement, P3)

Description

[John Slater]

Was playing around with the new Groups feature and was thinking it'd be great if I could add others to certain groups (correct me if I'm wrong but right now that doesn't seem all that possible).

So, something to consider for a future release.

Comment 1

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

Thoughts: 

We could go three ways here...

1. Allow only group 'owners' to request for people to join groups. 
2. Allow any vouched mozillian to request for people to join certain groups.
3. Option 2 and then once groups and flexible privacy is a little more robust, evolve and add option 1 on top of 2 with things like "security team" and "release-drivers".

The first option makes groups have a stricter hierarchy attached to it. The second option allows for groups to be a little more flexible/lightweight/flat, but loses the idea of owners for groups.

Comment 2

[Tantek Çelik]

Another option is:

4. Allow any vouched mozillian to immediately add anyone to any group, but have those (2nd party added groups) be listed in a separate section below, in reverse chronological order of additions, with title text (tooltip) that says *who* suggested that group for the person, and *when* they suggested it (note: this UI model, separating and showing 1st party groups/tags and 2nd party groups/tags with source/date of group/tag worked well - in terms of usability / user-adoption - in the consumating.com social profile site several years ago).

Comment 4

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

I came across this when triaging bugs with hoosteeno and think this could be nice to have. It's not a priority right now, but we may come back to this.

Comment 5

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

This is a good idea, but it has a bunch of complex implications. If anyone can add anyone to a group, that could get extremely annoying being added to random groups by random people, especially if we do any kind of group-based messaging etc.

If who can add you to groups is restricted in some way, or they can only "request" to add you to a group, that means we need to add a notification/invite/permissions model for this feature.

Just punting to 'owners only' doesnt necessarily solve anything because that means someone can create the group 'iOS lovers' and add me to it. Ick.

Comment 6

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

(In reply to Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus] from comment #5)
> This is a good idea, but it has a bunch of complex implications. If anyone
> can add anyone to a group, that could get extremely annoying being added to
> random groups by random people, especially if we do any kind of group-based
> messaging etc.

Agreed.

> If who can add you to groups is restricted in some way, or they can only
> "request" to add you to a group, that means we need to add a
> notification/invite/permissions model for this feature.

I think we could simplify this for what would be a common use case: stewards who want to manage the list of members (adding and removing users) for their functional areas.

Being able to add users to any group or even request that they join a group has lots of complexity. I think we may want to focus on managing who's in functional area groups first, which should be simpler and still very valuable.

Comment 7

[Dan Poirier [:dpoirier]]

Maybe just provide a way for group members to "invite" someone else to a group, that would send them an email with a link to join the group or something like that? Maybe include a personalized message from the inviter to the invitee(s).

Comment 8

[William Reynolds [:williamr]]

(In reply to Dan Poirier [:dpoirier] from comment #7)
> Maybe just provide a way for group members to "invite" someone else to a
> group, that would send them an email with a link to join the group or
> something like that? Maybe include a personalized message from the inviter
> to the invitee(s).

Yes, with the modification that only group owners can invite others to join. Justin included this in the curated groups specifications [1], so let's use this bug for creating that functionality.

User story:
As a curated group owner I can send invitations to individual users or groups of users

[1] https://mozillians.etherpad.mozilla.org/curated-group-specs