You cannot invite communities to member groups and you cannot invite member groups to communities. Here and in the following we use the term ‘community’ in the restricted sense of meaning the group of community members and not the community workspace or the member group of the community workspace, which also includes at least the manager and/or owner.
o If you could invite a community to a member group, the community would be a member in two workspaces, which would violate the principle of a one-to-one relation between a community and its associated community workspace.
Note: When searching for BSCW groups to be invited to the member group of a workspace, only member groups will be found. The member groups found may also contain member groups of community workspaces, i.e. member groups having a community as member.
o If you could invite a member group to a community, the potentially different roles of the members in the member group would not fit into the concept of the community as a group of many members with the same role.
Note: When searching for BSCW groups to be invited to a community, only communities will be found.
If you want to allow a community A access to a workspace B, you have two possibilities.
• Create a (possibly empty) community for B and invite community A to community B.
• Invite the member group of the community workspace of A to the workspace B.
If you want to allow the member group of workspace B access to community workspace A, you also have two possibilities.
• Invite the member group of B to the community workspace A.
• Convert the member group to a community B (as in our example “Crowded Workspace”) and invite this community B to community A.
When you invite a member group A to a member group B, you also embed workspace B into workspace A (see 4.1.4.2 Embedding a workspace into another workspace). When you invite a community A to a community B, the respective community workspaces stay independent of each other. The conditions of the case at hand determine which of the above solutions is to be preferred.
Reminder: For inviting communities and member groups, always use the option ‘Search for BSCW groups’ in the invitation form.