I believe we were talking about an even simpler solution than this in having ADMIN be the one that adds collaborators to projects (similarly, ADMIN assigns a user as project owner of a project... With this, admins are also the ones that create projects..basically admins create projects and assign the users to them ). Giving some of this power to the professionals/project owners in the future is a definite possibility, but having it all go through admins for the time being is effective. Yea?
If this is the case, admin could add collaborators to projects when it is created and also have the option to add a collaborator at any time during the project?
I think it would make more logical sense to assume the user was already created (in a separate admin screen), therefore already exists within the system, and can be selected when creating a project/editing a project.
Introduce the ability to add collaborators to a project.
Questions for @Taeben10