What is a community?
A community lets people who share a common interest interact with one another.
What makes a community?
Communities are groups of people with a common interest. A community with public access is available for all to join, while membership of a restricted community is limited to a particular group. You can also start a public community with moderated access, allowing you to control membership and manage access to the community's resources. Public communities and moderated communities are visible to all users, but restricted communities can only be seen by community members.
A community provides the means for users to stay in touch, share information, and exchange ideas. Communities provide an excellent way to connect members of a project team, organize a task force researching an emerging technology, or bring together a group of people who share any interest.
Starting a community can help you to build a valuable repository of information and expertise about a specific subject. In addition to sharing files, bookmarks, and other resources, when members need the solution to a specific problem, posting a question to the community forums is a great way to leverage knowledge within the community. Experts within the community can answer the questions and share their insights with other members.
Use the tools provided with the Communities app to reach out, make connections, get organized, and start sharing information. As a community owner, you can invite others to join, and manage the content and membership for the community. If owner moderation is enabled, you can also review and manage the content of community blogs, files, and forums.
Communities highlights
Whether you are added to or joining a community or starting one of your own, you can use these features to get the most out of your experience.
- On the navigation bar, click to see a list of the communities that you belong to.
- Participate in a community's discussion forum to explore topics of common interest and debate solutions to shared problems.
- Owners can access the Members page to add or remove members from your community. All members of the community can view the list of people who belong to the community.
- Use tags to assign descriptive keywords to your community. Tags are useful for searching for a particular type of community or filtering search results.
- Bring information into your community by sharing files and bookmarks with fellow members.
- Add apps to your community to make extra functionality available to members. For example, you might want to add a wiki to get your community collaborating or a blog for posting the latest community news. You must be a community owner to add apps to a community.
- Organize your community membership using subcommunities to create smaller subsets of members within the parent community. You must be a community owner to add subcommunities to a community.