Setup your current portal for subcommittees

Setting a single portal for multiple groups, such as the main board and subcommittees is simple. But there are three key areas to focus on:

• Roles
• Discussions
• Documents

You need to give consideration to exactly who needs access to what and why, then assign roles (preferably with the least privilege needed) accordingly.

👉 It is worth noting that when managing sub committee users in the same portal at the board on Our Cat Herder (no matter their committee), are all added to the main Members list of the portal. Our Cat Herder permissioning is best thought about as having a flat structure rather than a hierarchical structure. You do not group users but rather use the "lower" roles (which basically allows the system to manage it for you) and some additional permissions to restrict access within the same portal.

Roles

Ensure that you have set roles for your members that will restrict their access in a suitable way.

You can view the permissions each Role has here.

Our recommendation when using your portal for both board and subcommittee(s) is that all members added are assigned the "Member" role (unless they are to be an Administrator) and you only assign a higher role if becomes obvious that they really do require it (and the permissions of the new higher role will still restrict their access sufficiently).

Discussions

When using your portal for both board and subcommittee(s) we recommend setting all your discussion groups to be private groups. You can always change a group between "open" and "private" as needed in the future.

Documents

By default when a new member is added to your portal they have no access to the folders in documents until an Admin assigns the access.

However if you have been using your portal for a while we recommend you checkover/review existing members access before you start adding new members for committees.

Remember any individual file in the top level/Root of Documents is accessible to anyone you add to your portal.

Common scenarios when using OCH for Subcommittees

Below are some of the common scenarios you might encounter using one OCH portal for the board and subcommittees.

Running Meetings

These are the most common scenarios around meetings and multiple groups in a portal.

I don't want members to see all Meetings

If you assign the appropriate Role to your members this will not be an issue.

However it is worth noting that any member of your portal (no matter their role) can create a new meeting. This is an intentional choice by the OCH team because it provides increased flexibility around meeting administration, since meeting creators have full administration power for the meeting(s) they create without requiring Admin permissions to be assigned. But the Admin can still jump into the meeting if required.

When using your portal for both board and subcommittee(s) we suggest considering whether those members assigned Administration privileges will create all meetings or if you might also have specific subcommittee members creating the meetings (even if the Admin does a lot of setup once they are created) for their subcommittee. This provides the chosen subcommittee member with the administration powers required only for their meetings.

I need a specific person to have admin a meetings, but I do not want give them admin privileges

In this case you can:

a. have that person create the meeting b. set the person as the meeting chairperson c. invite the person as a minute taker

If you have any questions about configuring your portal for multiple groups within your organisation please contact us on support@ourcatherder.com