Com Leads Opening Confluence

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Recommendation

The SILS project will open Confluence for viewing by anyone on June 1, 2020. This allows SILS groups a month to get familiar with Confluence before opening access.

All SILS cohort members have a Confluence account to create and edit content. Members have full permissions (i.e., add or delete: pages, comments, blog, attachments) except to restrict pages from viewing.

All UC Libraries staff will have “view” access to the SILS Confluence site. The public will also have “view” access.

To more easily manage permissions, all spaces and pages will be open and viewable. There is substantial overhead in restricting pages from viewing and a core principle of the SILS project is to be open and transparent with communications (See SILS principle #10). Therefore, we will not restrict pages from viewing.

Content that is not ready or appropriate for public viewing such as Vacation/Out information should be stored on Google Shared Drive.

For Confluence questions or requests, contact the SILS project co-managers, Christine & Lena at SILS-PM-Leads-L@ucop.edu.

Background

The SILS Working Group’s objective is to make Confluence “viewable” to all UC Libraries so they can follow the progress of the SILS project including the decision-making process. The primary audience is UC libraries staff. We cannot limit access to only UC Libraries, therefore, our SILS Confluence site will be viewable by anyone with the URL.

Each group has a Confluence space. Every space is set up identically to provide a consistent experience for staff viewing the site and to set a standard for tracking and sharing project activities.

SILS project co-managers (Christine Barone and Lena Zentall) manage administration of Confluence and consult with the Operation Leads on policies.

The SILS Working Group space will be private due to frequent confidential discussions. The project co-managers will report regularly on project news and decisions including SILS Working Group activities.

Questions to consider

On restricting pages from viewing/editing:

1. Do we allow individuals or chairs to “restrict” pages (i.e., make them invisible)? Restrictions can be set very granularly, i.e, locked down to viewing and editing by only one person. The 3 options are to view and edit, view, restrict viewing and editing.

• Cons:

  • We would lose some transparency around the project.

  • You have to individually add users to view restricted pages and it could be easy to forget someone.

  • If someone restricts a page and then leaves the project (or is out for an extended period), others may be locked out who need access. (In the space settings, you can see “restricted pages” under Permissions.)

  • Adds work to administrators in instructing people on setting the restrictions and troubleshooting.

• Pros:

  • It provides some flexibility to hide content that is not ready for primetime or is highly-sensitive. Without this ability, groups may place content outside Confluence.

2. How do we manage linking from Confluence to Google shared drive to ensure we maintain control of access to the drive? For example, someone outside the cohort or even outside UC could request access to a google shared drive link. If this happens, the document creator will get an email prompting them to grant access to the document. Shared drive settings do not allow documents to be shared with non-members, so this is not a security risk; however, it could be annoying to cohort members if it generates a lot of request emails.

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