Groups & Research Hubs Guide

An OWL Group is the collaborative organizational unit for laboratories, academic departments, research institutes, student societies, and multi-institutional consortia on OpenWorldLab. Groups provide a shared public home, team directory, per-member access control, collaborative publication feeds, academic job listings, real-time team chat, and research crowdfunding tools.

When creating a group, select the category that best matches your organization. This determines how your group is cataloged in scientific directories and represented in institutional trees:

Academic research is organized on two levels: direct organizational containment (a lab inside a department inside a university) and collaborative networks (consortia, industrial sponsors, and joint grant partners). OWL models both with a single consent-gated link between two groups, in one of two kinds:

Because linking groups establishes a public organizational endorsement, connection requests require mutual consent. Owners and Admins hold the Request Group Links and Approve Group Links privileges by default, and both are delegable to other members.

1. Request Initiation: Open Dashboard > Connections on your group page and choose Link a group. The picker asks for one of three shapes — Sits above (the other group becomes your parent), Sits below (the other group becomes your subgroup), or Affiliated (a partnership with no hierarchy).
2. Disambiguation: Candidate rows carry the group’s logo, type, institution, current parent, member count, and summary — because “Department of Physics” exists once per university. Groups you cannot link to stay visible but greyed out with the reason (already linked, would create a loop).
3. Admin Notification: Administrators of the other organization receive a notification and review the pending request in their own Connections panel. Only the side that did not initiate can approve it.
4. Approval: Once approved, the connection becomes active immediately, updating breadcrumbs, rail boxes, the structure tab, and partner directories.
5. Instant Auto-Approval: If you already administer both organizations, the link is created as accepted straight away — approving your own request protects nobody.

• Create Subgroup shortcut: Creating a group from a parent’s Connections panel links it to that parent immediately, since the creator already administers the parent. This is the fastest way to build a real org chart.
• Either side can unlink an accepted connection at any time, and outbound requests can be cancelled while still pending.
• Anti-spam guardrails: A declined request cannot be re-sent to the same group for 30 days, and a group’s inbound queue is capped at 50 pending requests.
• Audited: Accepting or removing a link is written to the group audit log — “who attached us to that consortium?” stays answerable.

A university page that lists its departments but none of their work is an index, not a destination. Groups with accepted subgroups therefore aggregate their descendants’ content:

• What rolls up: Articles, updates, open job listings, and live fundraising campaigns from every group beneath you in the part-of tree.
• Campaign attribution: Aggregated campaign cards always carry the owning group’s name, because contributions still go to that group’s own Stripe account — never to the parent.
• Owner default: Aggregation is on by default when a group has subgroups. Anyone holding Edit Group Details can turn it off for the group.
• Reader override: Visitors can toggle aggregation for themselves on your public tabs; a choice matching your default keeps the URL clean.
• Public content only: Roll-up can only ever widen what is already public. Draft and archived views collapse back to the single group, so a parent never gains sight of a subgroup’s unpublished work.
• Structure tab: Groups with at least one accepted subgroup gain a Structure tab, showing the org chart as a navigable diagram plus a nested list.

A member’s rights are not decided by their role name alone. Each of the five membership roles is a preset — a starting set of ticks across the 24 individual privileges below — which group leadership can then adjust per member (section 7).

A sixth state, Invited, is a pending invitation rather than a role: it carries no privileges and no team chat access until the invitation is accepted.

Presets are a starting point, not a ceiling. A comms officer who writes campaign updates and a finance officer who issues refunds should not hold the same rights, and neither of them needs to be made an Admin to do their job.

Anyone holding Change Member Roles can open a member’s row in the group Members tab and click the pencil icon (Edit Role & Privileges). The dialog shows the chosen role’s preset, and each of the 24 privileges can be left inheriting, explicitly granted, or explicitly revoked.

• Inheritance is the default: A privilege you never touch keeps following the role preset — including when the preset itself changes later. Only the ticks you explicitly set are stored.
• Reset to defaults: One button clears every customization and returns the member to their role’s preset.
• Changing role keeps revocations: Moving someone to a new role drops the extra rights granted against their old preset, but any right you explicitly took away stays taken away.
• You cannot grant what you do not hold: Rights you lack are silently dropped from any change you submit — nobody mints privileges for others that they do not have themselves.
• Member-management rights are owner-gated: Handing out privileges in the Members area additionally requires Promote to Admin, which only the Owner holds by default. Delegating content, jobs, or fundraising work is the feature; manufacturing co-administrators is not.
• Rank still applies: You can only act on members below your own role, you can never edit your own privileges, and the Owner’s rights cannot be customized at all — otherwise a group could be left with nobody able to administer it.
• Every change is audited: Role changes and privilege changes are recorded separately in the group audit log, with the before and after state.

To comply with international Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards and financial auditing regulations outlined in our Fundraising Policy:

• Groups that have never run a fundraising campaign can be deleted completely.
• Groups that have ever launched a campaign cannot be erased from historical records because financial auditing rules require a 5-year immutable audit trail of all transactions, compliance reviews, and donor records.
• Instead, deleting the group performs an Archival Soft-Delete: the group is permanently hidden from public search, directories, and member profiles, while financial audit records remain securely archived.
• Archived and banned groups also disappear from every hierarchy view — breadcrumbs, rail boxes, structure diagrams, and content roll-up — for every group they were linked to.