System - Add shared groups (communities)

[dvstans]

There is a need for communities of users to be able to easily communicate and share data. The current group system allows one users to share data with a small group (limited by the manual process of adding individual users), but these groups cannot be used by members of the group to share their own data with the group (groups are private to the owner). The other option is to publish collections, but this opens data up to everyone and also does not provide any community support.

The idea is to provide new public groups (called "communities") that have one or more administrators (rather than owners) who can manage membership of the group. Any member of a public group can use the group to set ACLs on their data (project members must have sharing permission with the project). Public groups would also provide social features such as group notification, discussions, and data events (the group could be a proxy data event source much like a collection). Public groups could be discovered using topics like public collections, or by browsing other user memberships, and once found, a mechanism for requesting membership would be available (somewhat like facebook).

Communities could be hierarchical (or relational) and allow sub-communities (or working groups, committees, etc) to be formed for finer-grained social/data information flow, but be somewhat visible to the parent community. This would require three levels of information visibility: community members, community parent, and public.

This feature will render default sharing permission obsolete.

[JoshuaSBrown]

I agree this should be removed as an issue.