Communities

A community is a group of people managed by its owners and admins: a lab, an ecosystem, a program cohort, a conference. Most of what you do on JOGL Network happens inside the communities you belong to — searches, the people directory, analytics, and events are all scoped to them.

Joining a community

There are three ways in:

• Discover Communities — from the community picker in the header, open the directory at Discover Communities. It lists public communities and the ones you already belong to; you can search and filter between All communities and My communities, and join a public community directly.
• An invite link — admins of a public community can share a link that never expires. Open it, and choose Join Community (or Sign in to join).
• An invitation — an admin can invite you by name. The invitation arrives as a card in your Messages; Accept to join. If the community has reached its member limit, the card tells you and you can't join yet.

You can also be put in one without doing anything: when a community admin imports members from a CSV or a CRM, syncs an event's guest list, or adds people through the API, the import writes the membership directly — no invitation, no card in your Messages.

Whether that membership reaches your account depends on what the import matched:

• It already knew you — the import matched an account you had already claimed, so the membership is yours immediately and the community appears in your picker.
• It did not — the import creates an internal placeholder record instead, under an address that is not yours, and the membership belongs to that record. Signing up later does not pull it across on its own. The community has to make that record claimable at your address first; then signing in with that address claims it, and its data and memberships become yours. Event guest imports are the usual case where that happens.

So your community picker is the authoritative list of where you are a member. If a community says it added you and you cannot see it, that placeholder is the likely reason — ask them to make your profile claimable.

Private communities are hidden from the directory from everyone who is not already a member, so you join one by invitation. An invite link does not get you into a private community: the join page looks the community up under the same visibility rules as the directory, so someone who is not yet a member sees "Community not found" instead of a join button. Once you are a member, your private communities do appear in the directory, listed alongside the public ones and marked as private. There is no "request to join" flow today, and no self-service way to leave a community — ask an admin to remove you.

Inside a community

Select a community in the header picker to scope your searches to it. The sidebar's People entry opens the community's directory, with four views:

When the community runs an event, a Networking entry appears in the sidebar — see Event mode.

Your reach

Being in a community also defines who you can reach. Members of your own communities and your connections are within reach for messages, connection requests, and meeting requests, subject to each person's own contact settings (someone can still limit messages to their connections, or to no one). Reaching people outside that circle is open to verified accounts; an account the platform has not verified may be asked to verify first. See My Network.