launchpad helpStrong communities are built on teams. Launchpad has a very rich infrastructure to support the creation of teams, which allows communities to develop in a sophisticated fashion around projects or initiatives.
Let's look at a team:
Here's a snapshot of part of the page at the time of writing:
attachment:teamoverview.png
As you can see, this team has a list of folks who have just recently joined, and also a list of people who have recently applied to join but not yet been approved for membership. This highlights a useful feature of Launchpad team management - membership subscription policies. You can create a team which is entirely open - anybody can join just by adding themselves to the team. You can also have a team which is moderated, as Launchpad Beta Testers is, which means that anybody can apply to join but the team administrators have to approve your membership. And finally, you can have a team which is restricted - the only way to become a member is to have a team administrator add you to the team.
These subscription policies are similar to those used for mailing lists. They allow you, as the creator or administrator of a team, to decide how flexible you want to be, and to maintain good control of the growth of your community if you want that.
