Create & configure a community

The creation wizard, the free-trial gate, general settings, roles, and the danger zone.

A community is the container for a group of members, their enriched profiles, analytics, and events. If you own or administer one, this is where you set it up.

Before you start: trial or plan

Creating a community needs an active free trial, a plan, or a contract on your account — unless you are a JOGL app administrator, who is exempt from both this check and the plan's community limit below. The creation screens check this first and show one of:

Start your free trial to create a community — a card is saved with Stripe and not charged during the trial, and nothing renews on its own. After Stripe hands you back, the page shows Activating your trial for a few seconds.
Your free trial has ended — Choose a plan takes you to Billing.
You've reached your community limit — your current plan includes a fixed number of communities; Upgrade plan to create more. Without a paid subscription you can own one.

The creation wizard

Creating a community runs a short wizard: Details → Source → Import → Enrich → Progress.

Step 1 (Details) asks for:

Community name (required)
Description
Visibility — Private (default: only invited members can see this community) or Public (anyone can discover and join it)
AI data processing — Global (default) or Europe (EU); see data residency

You can change all of these later in the community's General tab.

Later steps let you pick a source to seed members (CSV, a CRM, Luma, or your LinkedIn connections export), run the import, and optionally kick off an enrichment pass — see Member management and Enrichment. A community seeded from Luma skips the two enrichment screens and goes straight to its dashboard, but enrichment is not skipped: the Luma sync runs its own enrichment phase and the app tells you it "will continue in the background."

General settings

The General tab lets you edit:

Logo (auto-optimized on upload)
Name and Description
Visibility (Public / Private)
AI Data Processing (Global / Europe (EU))

A verification step for making a community public is being rolled out. Where it is active, an account whose trust level reads unverified cannot switch a community to public, and the app explains what to do. Accounts created before trust levels existed carry no level and count as trusted, so they are unaffected — but an account a moderator has flagged for review reads unverified however old it is.

Data residency

The AI Data Processing control sets where your community's AI is meant to run:

Global — AI (search + enrichment LLM calls) runs on the default global routing.
Europe (EU) — AI runs on in-region EU endpoints.

It's editable by any community admin or owner, and changing it affects future AI processing only. Data residency governs the language model used for search and enrichment; it does not re-route embeddings or external data acquisition (LinkedIn data, web research). Credits cost the same for Global and EU.

Roles

Community membership has three roles: owner, admin, and member. Owners and admins can manage settings, members, enrichment, events, and integrations. Ownership can be transferred to another claimed member (the previous owner keeps admin rights). Unless the community is owned by an organization, billing for owner-paid actions moves with ownership. At least one admin or owner must always remain.

Don't confuse roles (access) with the Tags tab, which defines named expertise tags with search-boost weights — a search-tuning feature, not an access-control one. See Search tuning.

Danger zone

At the bottom of the General tab:

Archive Community — any admin can archive (and later unarchive) the community.
Delete Community — only available once archived, and only for the owner, an owner of the owning organization, or a platform admin. You confirm by typing the community name. The community's records — knowledge base entries, integrations, analytics caches — are deleted with it. The files behind knowledge-base documents are the exception: deleting the community removes the document rows but leaves the uploaded files in storage. Delete a document from the Context tab first if you need its file gone too; that path does remove it. Internal and claimable profiles that belonged only to that community are removed by a background job the deletion starts. If that start is not confirmed within ten seconds, the app says so — but do not read that as "nothing is happening". Once the deletion has recorded its audit row, a watchdog runs every 15 minutes and re-kicks a stalled cleanup up to three times, so an unconfirmed start is usually just a slow acknowledgement and the job is still working. Give it an hour before intervening. Only a failure so early that no audit row was written falls outside that recovery; that is the case where the leftover profiles have to be cleared by hand.