Group
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An Organic Group is a group of people who share a particular interest, for example a group of all the people who are interested in car-pooling together. The group is organic because the query used to define it is able to be adapted by the interested members, and because the context itself serves as an informational portal for the group allowing it to refine and evolve under collaboration. Organic groups may also make use of organisational groupware and group decision tools to manage the shared pool of resources made available to the context by the members. Some software such as Drupal inherently support this concept (in fact Drupal even has the same name for it), whereas other software such as MediaWiki needs to be set up specifically to work in this way.
At Organic Design we have a specific plan of how we'd like to use the Organic Group concept. The overall idea is very similar to the Drupal usage of the concept whereby each Organic Group forms exhibits a home page, or "portal" through which all the necessary tools and resources for that group are made available. Some common tools used by such groups are blogs, forums, wiki pages, mailing lists, group decision-making tools (such as polls), project management tools, shared schedules and online chat systems,
Group types
There should be different types of Organic Group which all work the same way, but have specific layouts and collections of tools. Such types represent the major concepts such as Organisation, Role, Project or Campaign. As well as acting as a container for tools and resources and exhibiting various members, these groups should also have their own data fields and views so that they can be searched for and accessed from various contexts.
Collaboration
The tools that are selected and the way they're laid out should be able to be published as a template option so that it's an available option for others to use. These options should be able to be searched by popularity and other properties so that people can see which portal methodologies are being most widely used in within particular contexts. Publishers should be able to includes notes about their decisions so that others can make informed decisions about their choices.
Splitting and merging
Groups should be able to divide in separate groups, or merge multiple groups into a single group, as well as be able to create sub-groups. For example if a group decision is unable to be resolved, the group could split into two, or an group representing an organisation may wish to create sub-groups representing various departments and further into projects or roles. Note that Roles are a separate concept, but roles may like to have an Organic Group for themselves as a common portal catering to their specific needs.
