Teams/CreatingAndRunning

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Launchpad Help > Teams > Creating and running a team

Overview

Building a strong community around your project or a particular effort within a project is often crucial to its success. Launchpad teams help you to bring people together by offering:

Teams are easy to use: Launchpad doesn't impose rules or a particular workflow on how you use your teams. Although most teams are associated with a particular project, there isn't a formal link.

Anyone can create a team. To get going, visit the new team page. You'll probably notice that creating a team is very similar to registering a user account. This isn't a coincidence: teams and people work in the same way throughout most of Launchpad.

Of course, there are some differences. When you first register a team, keep an eye out for:

You can change any of these details later using the Change details link on your team's overview page.

Private (proprietary) teams

When you maintain a project with a commercial subscription, you will see the visibility field on the team registration and "Change details" pages.

You may be able to change a "Public" team to a "Private" team if it is not subscribed or own something that can only be public. Once the team is in a public relationship, it cannot ever be made "Private" Private team cannot ever be made "Public". Do not choose to make team "Private" if you want it to be public in the future.

Non-members team cannot see that the team exists in Launchpad. Non-members cannot see any of the team's pages. Private teams can choose to be in some public relationships, such as subscribed to a public bug, but doing so requires the team to agree to reveal its Launchpad Id and other unique attributes. This rule ensures that no one can spy on others. Private teams have additional privileges:

Branding your team

Branding is one of the ways in which teams are similar to people. Similar to your own Launchpad account, you can upload images to help others identify pages associated with your team:

What team membership means

It's up to you what membership of your team means. Some teams exist to give people the chance to make a public declaration while others grant access to privileged parts of a project's activity.

In general, members of your team get:

There are also two special types of membership for people who run your team:

These roles can be held by other teams, as well as by people.

Membership policies

There are four kinds ofmembership policy that control who and how a user or team can become a member. The choice of policy reflects the need to build a community (inclusive) versus the need to control control Launchpad projects, branches, and PPAs (exclusive).

Managing membership requests

If you've chosen the moderated or delegated membership policy, Launchpad will email you whenever someone applies to join.

The email tells you:

Let's take a look at the membership list for the Launchpad Beta Testers team. As a team administrator, you'll see a pencil icon beside each member's name. This allows you to edit existing memberships and new applications.

This is Chris Jones' application.

proposed-member.png

Accept or reject a membership application

Here, Launchpad links Chris's name to his profile. A person's profile page offers you an accurate reflection of the sort of work they do in Launchpad. Not only does it give you the information they've written about themselves but it also automatically tells you which teams they're most active in, what sort of work they do and on which projects. If you still need more information, Chris's profile shows you different ways of getting in touch with him.

Whether you choose to accept or reject a membership application, Launchpad will inform the prospective member and all the team's administrators by email. You can add a custom message to this email, which is particularly useful if you want to suggest first steps to new members or explain why you've declined an application.

Membership expiry

Setting an automatic expiry on team memberships can be useful if your team is for a time-limited activity or you want to give people a reminder to review their membership.

You can both:

Launchpad emails anyone who has a team membership that is about to expire. How they renew their membership is up to you:

Bulk moderation

If several people have applied to join your moderated team, you can bulk approve and decline their memberships with the Approve or decline members link below the Proposed members list.

Teams joining teams

Pyroom is a simple text editor designed to minimise distractions. The Pyroom developers use Launchpad to track bugs, host code and make translations. In addition to a general Pyroom team, they also have a bug team that acts as the project's bug contact and a dev team that has owns its trunk development branch.

Because teams behave just like people in Launchpad, the Pyroom bug and dev teams can join the main Pyroom team. Thanks to that, members of Pyroom's bug and dev teams are indirect members of the main Pyroom team: they have access to everything that a direct member has.

There are two ways for one team to join another team and which you use depends on your role:

If you add another team to your own, you're actually inviting that team to join. Launchpad will email the other team's admins with your invitation, allowing them to decide whether or not to add their team to yours.

Next step

Good communication within a team is essential. Let's set up a team mailing list to help members discuss their work.

< Joining a team

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Teams/CreatingAndRunning (last edited 2018-03-08 16:49:57 by cjwatson)