How to Manage HDX Organization Membership

The following guidance explains how the administrator of an organization on HDX can manage membership. 

Organization membership includes three roles:

• Administrators, who can add, edit and delete datasets belonging to the organization and manage membership (which is what we're talking about here!)

• Editors, who can add, edit and delete datasets belonging to the organization but cannot manage membership.

• Members, who can view the organization's public and private datasets, but cannot add, edit, delete datasets or manage membership.

As the administrator, you have capabilities to manage members of your organization.  We'll cover how to do each of them below. In summary, you can:

Invite users to your organization

It's simple, just select the role you want the user to have and start typing a user's name, username, or email address.  If they are already a registered user, their name will be shown. If you invite them, they will immediately be added to your organization with the role you have selected. If they are not a registered user on HDX, by submitting their email address, a temporary username will be created for them and they will be invited to confirm by email. 

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Accept or reject requests to join your organization

If you can confirm that this user works for your organization or is in your trusted network, then you may approve the request. If you cannot verify who the user is, you should decline the request. Please do not approve membership requests for people outside your organization or working group.

If a user requests to join your organization, all of the admins in your organization will receive an email notifying them of the request. If you’re logged in as an organization admin, the notification icon will indicate pending membership requests (see screenshot below). You can also see pending requests on your organization page on the members tab.  If you don't see a "Pending Approval" section, then you don't have any pending requests.

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When you click on the "Approve" button, you will be able to choose which role you want to give to the user. 

When you accept or reject a request, the user is notified by email. If your organization has multiple admins, all the admins will be notified by email.

Change the role of a user

You can easily change the role of any user by clicking the "Change role" link next to each user's name.  Your organization always has to have at least one user whose role is Admin.

Editors or admins whose role is changed to member will lose the ability to edit datasets belonging to your organization, even if they are listed as the maintainer of a dataset.  As a dataset maintainer, they will continue to receive emails when someone uses the "contact the contributor" button on that dataset. To change the maintainer of a dataset, you must edit the dataset directly and select a new maintainer.

Remove a user from an organization

The "Remove from this organization" link will remove a user from your organization.  This will not delete the user from HDX, only from your organization. 

As with changing a user's role in your organization (described above), removing a user will not remove them from being the maintainer of any datasets, however they will lose the ability to edit those datasets. To change the maintainer of a dataset, you must edit the dataset directly and select a new maintainer.

If you are the only admin for your organization and want to change the role or remove yourself from the organization - you will be asked to assign the admin role to at least one existing member of the organization.

Turn on/off “Request membership” display option

As organization admins, you have the option to allow registered HDX users to send requests to join your organization on HDX. You will find this option as a checkbox, “Allow membership requests,” under “edit organization page”. This feature is turned on by default and a “Request Membership” link will be displayed to registered users on your HDX organization page. New HDX users will be able to send you requests to join your organization when they sign up to HDX for the first time. You will be notified by email when such requests are sent.

If you don’t want to allow any member to join your organization - you can turn off the “Allow membership requests” checkbox in under “edit organization page”(see screenshot below). This will make your organization a closed group with existing members. No new member will be able to send a request to join your organization on HDX. The admin(s) of your organization can still manually invite new members, remove existing members or change their roles from the "Members" tab.