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 four 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. A public community either lets you in at once with Join Community, or, when its admins approve each new member, carries an Approval required badge and offers Request to join instead (see Asking to join).
• A join link — every community has a join page with its own link, which its admins can pass on to you. Open it and choose Join Community or Request to join; if you are signed out, Sign in to join takes you to sign in first.
• A personal invite link: a member or an admin can send you their own invite link, which records them as the person who invited you. Opening it shows who sent it and the community; using it takes a click, Join the community or Ask to join, and if you are signed out, Sign in or create an account comes first. It is also how someone with no account gets one while JOGL Network is open by invitation (see Invite links).
• An invitation — an admin can invite you by name. The invitation arrives as a card in your Messages, and it also waits in the community picker under Pending Invitations, where a dot on the picker flags it and you can accept or decline it; you get a push notification too where you have them turned on. Accept to join. If the community has reached its member limit, the card in your Messages tells you and you can't join yet; the invitation stays open.

If you neither belong to a community nor manage one through an organization, the search page says so. With Jojo on, Jojo says it with Find a community, which opens Discover Communities, and Create a community (kept small, it shows only a short note leading to Discover Communities); a waiting invitation is a message of its own, which Jojo says first. With Jojo off, the page shows You're not in a community yet with the same two buttons and, when an invitation is waiting, a button to see it. While a setup you started is still unfinished, the page offers to resume it instead. If the only community you have is your own empty personal network and a free trial or plan covers you, the page says Nobody in your network yet instead, with Import my LinkedIn connections and Create a community.

An account the platform has not verified yet can't join on its own. Choosing Join Community then tells you to ask one of the community's admins to invite you. A member's invite link offers Ask to join instead and sends the admins a request, naming the member who shared it, unless it is the link that brought you to JOGL Network, which lets you in. An invitation, an approved request to join and an admin's invite link still work, and so does a community importing you.

An admin can also add you directly when you already have an account: you then get a message from Jojo saying who added you, with an Open the community button, and an email as your notification settings allow.

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. An event's guest list and the API treat an account of your own differently: when the admin used the email you sign in with and could find you by it (you are one of their connections, or a member of another community they run), and you are not a member yet, you get the community's usual invitation in your Messages instead, and you join only if you accept it. When the admin could not find you by that email, an event's guest list leaves you out, adding nothing and sending nothing, while the API makes a placeholder record, as in the second case below; the API does that too whenever the call uses an organization's key rather than a person's, since such a key invites nobody. And an event's guest list never asks twice: once you have declined an invitation to that community, or accepted one and then left, its next syncs leave you out too.

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

• It already knew you — a CSV or CRM import matched an account you had already claimed, or you were a member already, 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. An import never does this on its own: the community's admin chooses whom to invite, an event's guests included.

When a community makes your profile claimable it emails you an invitation. That email carries a one-click unsubscribe, which mail apps can offer as a button: using it stops these invitation emails from every community at that address. You can still sign in, and your other emails are unaffected.

So your community picker is the authoritative list of where you are a member, with one addition: if you manage communities through an organization without being a member of them, it lists those too, marked Admin and with no counts under the name. Those are communities you manage, not memberships. Each community you belong to shows your role and, under its name, how many profiles and how many members it has: profiles counts everyone the community lists, members only the people who have signed in and claimed their profile, and neither counts an archived profile. 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.

Your picker also lists your personal network, a private community only you can see, where the people you already know go (see Contacts).

With the scope on All my network, the sidebar's My communities opens a page listing every community you run or belong to, under All, I manage and Member, with Search here, People and, for the ones you manage, Admin dashboard on each. A Waiting on you card at the top gathers what needs your answer: invitations to you, meeting requests and, in communities you manage, requests to join.

Private communities are hidden from the directory from everyone who is not already a member, so you join one by invitation or through an admin's invite link, since only admins can make links there. Where its admins approve each new member, that link sends them a request, the only way to ask to join a private community; the link's page is then where you follow it and can cancel it, because the community stays hidden from you until you are approved. A join link does not get you into a private community: signed out, the join page asks you to sign in first (Sign in to open this community); signed in, someone who is not a member sees "Community not found" instead of a join button. The exception is a profile the community has made claimable at your address: signing in with that address claims it, and you arrive as a member. Once you are a member, your private communities do appear in the directory, listed alongside the public ones and marked with a lock.

Invite links

Everyone who may invite into a community has their own invite link, an address on my.jogl.network/i/: its admins, and in a public community every member, who find it under Invite on the community's People page. The link's page shows who sent it and the community: its name, logo, member count and description. Opening it joins nothing; what using it does follows the community's choice of who can join:

• Join the community makes you a member at once, where the community lets people join.
• Ask to join sends the admins a request, without a note, where they approve each new member, and through a member's link when your account is not verified yet. The link's page then shows Request pending, with Cancel request. If a profile was already prepared for you on JOGL Network and your first sign-in comes through the link, you join without a request.

Signed out, Sign in or create an account takes you to the sign-in page, which names the community the link leads to and brings you back to the link once you are in. You can also create your account there, with an email code, Google or Microsoft, even while JOGL Network is open by invitation, as long as the link can still create accounts: a member's link creates a limited number, an admin's as many as needed, and one that cannot says so when you sign in, pointing you back to the person who shared it.

If you are new to JOGL Network, signing in through the link takes you through the welcome: your profile, a check that it is you, joining the link's community (or asking to join it) at Your place, who sees your profile, and, once you are a member of a community with other described members, a first search in it. If you asked to join, you land on the search page while your request waits.

A link stops working when its holder replaces it, an admin turns it off, or its holder can no longer invite there (a member's link stops when the community goes private). Its page then says This invite link no longer works: ask the person who sent it for a new one. A request you sent through it stays on that page while it waits, so you can still cancel it there.

Asking to join

Request to join opens a short form where you can leave the admins a note (up to 500 characters) before you Send request. The community then shows Request pending until an admin decides, and Cancel request withdraws it. If they approve, you become a member; if they decline, it shows Request not accepted and you can ask again after 30 days. You are told of the decision by push and email, following your notification settings: an approval comes with a button to the community, a decline with how many days are left before you can ask again. The decision also shows on the community's card in Discover Communities and on its join page (or, for a request sent through an invite link, on that link's page), and an approved community appears in your picker. Your note is deleted once the request is decided or withdrawn, and a pending request is closed if the community is made private or archived; a request you withdraw, or one closed that way, sends no notice.

Leaving a community

On the community's card in Discover Communities, choose Leave, then Leave community to confirm; on My communities, choose Leave community from the card's menu. You lose access to the community, and the access to its members that it gave you: members you are connected to or share another community with stay visible to you, as do public profiles. An owner or admin of the organization that pays for the community, who holds a seat in that organization, keeps admin access to the community and its members after leaving. To come back, you join again, which may need an admin's approval or an invitation. The owner's card has no Leave: the owner is whoever pays for the community, so ownership changes hands through a transfer instead. If you are the community's last admin, make another member an admin before you leave, someone who has signed in: an admin whose profile nobody has claimed yet does not count. Communities their admins archived are listed under Archived communities at the bottom of the directory, where you are still a member and can leave them too.

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, an Events 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.