Effective project management and collaboration require a clear understanding of access rights and permissions. On our platform, we've designed a robust system that allows you to control which residents can view and participate in a project, as well as which staff can edit, and manage content at different levels, ensuring that your projects and folders are handled securely and efficiently. In this article, we'll explore the three key levels of access rights: Folder Level, Project Level, and Phase Level, and explain how each can be utilised to target your consultations better and collect resident demographic data.
Folder level Access Rights
At the top level, Folder Level Access Rights provide management of multiple projects within a single folder. As a folder manager, you have the authority to edit folder pages, update descriptions, and oversee all the projects housed within that folder. This role is crucial for maintaining a coherent structure and ensuring that all projects are aligned with the overarching goals of the folder. Once a folder is published, it becomes visible to everyone on the platform. While this visibility is currently not customizable, it ensures that all users have access to the folder's contents, promoting transparency.
Project level Access Rights
Offering more nuanced control over who can see and interact with specific projects.
Project visibility
Within the project settings, you can define who has visibility of the project, ensuring that sensitive or in-progress projects are only accessible to the appropriate audience. A project can be seen by :
Anyone: anyone who visits the platform will be able to see the project and browse its content, although they will need to log in to participate. If you choose this option, the content of the project is therefore also accessible to non-registered visitors to the platform (although they will need to log in to participate).
Administrators and project managers: only people with admin rights to the project will be able to view the project on the platform. This option is regularly used to allow admins to test and view the project before it is launched to participants.
Selection: only participants belonging to certain user groups will be able to see the project on the platform. As access to the project is restricted, participants will first have to log in to the platform to be able to view the project.
The default option is "Anyone", so if you don't make any changes, everyone who visits your platform will be able to view the project.
Project management
You can assign editing and management rights to staff and external members (note: they must have a registered account on the platform). This ensures that only authorized project managers can make changes to the project, thereby safeguarding the integrity of the work.
Phase level Access Rights & Permissions
For each phase of a project, and for each type of action (posting input, commenting, voting, filling in a survey...) you can decide who can participate.
Authentication
Depending on the method that is used, three or four types of authentication flows are possible. Our back office UI interface makes it easy for you to follow what type of information and permissions requirements will be required of the end-user for each of the possible flows:
Administrators and project managers: this toggle allows only those with management rights for this project to be able to participate. This can be toggled on or off for each phase.
Anyone (only available with surveys): in the context of surveys, it is possible to open participation to visitors who are not registered or logged in on the platform. In this case, any person visiting the platform can take part in the survey without providing any demographic or contact information.
Please note, If you set access rights to a survey to “anyone”, the visitor can respond to the survey as often as they want, and you risk duplicate answers. We do not track IP addressess so we cannot tell you if you receive duplicates.
Email confirmation: Residents only need to provided an email and confirmed it to be able able to participate. This is a great option for lowering project participation requirements and increasing the chances of engagement.
Please, note that with the 'email confirmation' access rights, users will not be given a user their name, so we will be autogenerating it for them. To select between the 2 options for username generation we offer, please go to Settings > General.
Account creation: residents need to have gone through the full registration flow on the platform to be able to participate.
SSO verification (if you do not see this option it means it is not available on your price plan): residents need to first verify their identify with the chosen SSO before participating. Here you can also set up a re-verification frequency to make sure the data of residents is most up to date. This is most useful for high stake projects which require frequent verification of participants to make the project is getting inputs from the right residents.
Asking demographical registration questions to residents before participation:
Below you can set up “Extra questions asked to participants” which residents will need to answer before participating. These are the same questions used in the registration process and are used to collect demographic data. Responses to these registration questions will get stored as user data under each users’ profile. These responses may be used to create Smart Groups in the future.
By default
ALL registration questions are enabled under the option "Account Creation". You can decided to make them required or not by pressing “edit”. You can delete the ones that are not relevant for the phase.
NO registration questions are enabled under the option "Email Confirmation". This verification method exists to have a quick participation flow with minimal steps for the resident. However you can always add any registration questions that you wish to get data from anyways in the "Extra Questions" section.
You can remove or add existing registration questions to match the data you want to collect for this project.
Only admins (not project managers) can edit the title/options of the registration question or create new registration questions - this can be done in the platform settings under "registration".
Restrict participation to user group(s):
After selecting the authentication you can also set participation only for a certain user group. Participants on the platform who belong to certain user groups and who can view the project will be able to participate.
