Create & configure a community

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, and nothing renews on its own: when the trial ends, you pick a plan to keep the community running. The screen also lists what the trial includes (credits, communities, profiles per community and days). 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. The free trial includes one. Archived communities do not count towards the limit.
• Your plan doesn't include communities — on Plus, which owns no community. Communities come with the Pro plans; Upgrade plan takes you to Billing.

The plans and their prices are listed in Settings → Billing and on the pricing page.

If you own or administer an organization, the creation screens first ask Who is this community for?: Myself, or one of those organizations. A community created for an organization runs on the organization's plan and counts towards its allowance, and the organization's owner owns it: if you administer the organization without owning it, you become an admin of the community. The checks above are then about the organization. Without a plan, while its one free trial is unused, the screen shows Start a free trial for the organization, on the same terms as your own trial, with Choose a plan for this organization beside it; after Stripe hands you back, the organization is still selected. Once its trial is used, the screen shows This organization has no active plan (Choose a plan for this organization), and at its limit Upgrade the organization's plan.

The creation wizard

Create Community, in the community switcher or on Discover Communities, opens the Create a community screen. Import your LinkedIn connections builds a private community from your LinkedIn data export for you; Create a new community runs a short wizard: Details → Source → Import → Enrich → Progress. The LinkedIn import also asks for the new community's name (My LinkedIn Connections unless you change it) and its AI data processing region, and creates the community when the import starts.

Step 1 (Details) asks for:

• Community name (required)
• Description
• Who can see it — 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 section.

If you create a Private community for yourself, the form also says that its members' searches and other actions in it will be paid from your credits, up to 20 credits per member. That is a delegation rule the community starts with.

Later steps let you pick a source to seed members (a CSV or Excel file, a CRM, a Luma event, or your LinkedIn connections export), run the import, and optionally kick off an enrichment pass — see Member management and Enrichment. On the Source step, whoever pays for the community also sees its launch offer, which opens with the first member import. A community seeded from Luma skips the two enrichment screens, but enrichment is not skipped: the Luma sync runs its own enrichment phase and the app tells you it "will continue in the background."

When the wizard ends, it opens the new community's People section with a note saying the community is ready and a Search this community button. If you reload the page after the Details step, the wizard comes back to the Source step of the community it just created instead of starting over. Once that step has created the community, the wizard's Cancel reads Leave setup: leaving keeps the community.

General settings

The General section of the admin dashboard lets you edit:

• Logo (auto-optimized on upload)
• Name and Description
• Visibility (Public / Private)
• Who can join (Invite links while the community is private) — see below
• Engagement figures, which figures the dashboard's Engagement section shows
• AI processing, its Region (Global / European Union)

Below the form sit the community's delegation rules and the danger zone.

Who can join

Every community has a Who can join setting. In a public community it covers the join page and invite links. In a private one, where only admins can make invite links, it reads Invite links and covers those links.

• Anyone can join (the default; Anyone with a link joins while the community is private) — in a public community, people join in one click from Discover Communities, from the community's join page, or from a member's personal invite link (see Member management). In a private one, whoever uses an admin's invite link joins.
• Admins approve requests — people send a request to join instead, including when they use an invite link, and any admin approves or declines it in the dashboard's Join requests section. A request can carry an optional note, except one sent through an invite link. On Discover Communities a public community is marked Approval required and its button reads Request to join. One exception: someone who signs in for the first time through an invite link to claim a profile an organization had already created joins without a request.

Pending requests are counted beside Join requests in the dashboard. Making a public community private, or archiving a community, cancels the requests still pending; switching back to Anyone can join leaves them in the list for you to decide. Making a community private also stops its members' invite links, while admins' links keep working. Email invitations, admin adds and imports bring people in whichever option is set. An account whose trust level reads unverified cannot join on its own from Discover Communities, the join page or a member's invite link, unless that link is the one that brought it to JOGL. It can still come in through an invitation, an approved request, or an admin's invite link while Anyone can join is set. See Member management for the request list and Communities for what members see.

Data residency

The AI processing region (AI data processing in the creation wizard) sets where your community's AI is meant to run:

• Global — AI (search + enrichment LLM calls) runs on the default global routing.
• European Union (Europe (EU) in the wizard) — AI runs on in-region EU endpoints, with the exceptions below.

It's editable by any community admin or owner, and changing it affects future AI processing only. Data residency governs the AI models used for the community's search and enrichment, embeddings included: its members' profiles, its knowledge documents and the searches run in it are embedded in the EU, and the scan of an uploaded knowledge document for people and organizations follows the setting too. It does not re-route web research and look-ups, which use external services that may process member data outside the EU: for example Perplexity (web research), Tavily (LinkedIn, Doctolib and organization look-ups), Apify (LinkedIn data), OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar (publications), BrightData (Doctolib), SerpApi (Google Patents) and Google Maps (location). Some personal features, such as questions suggested about a member and message suggestions, follow each member's own setting (see Privacy & GDPR) rather than the community's, and some of them, such as message suggestions, fall back to global routing when that setting cannot be read. JOGL's internal search-quality experiments are not covered either. Credits cost the same for Global and EU.

Delegation rules

Delegation rules, below the settings form, let whoever pays for the community cover what its members do there (searches, enrichment and other member actions), from a start date, until an optional end, within optional limits per member and in total. Each rule shows its status (Active, Scheduled, Paused, Ended or Budget used up), its limits, its dates and the credits used so far.

• On a community you pay for personally, as its owner, you add a rule with New rule and can Edit, Pause or Resume each one. Other admins see the rules read-only.
• On a community billed to an organization, the organization's owners and admins manage its rules here. Rules covering every community of the organization are listed too, but are managed in Billing settings. Other admins see the rules read-only.

A Private community you create for yourself starts with one rule: members' actions are paid from your credits, up to 20 credits per member each billing month, with no end date and no total limit. Past a rule's limits, or when the payer's credits run out, members pay with their own. Making a community public pauses the personal rules on it, since anyone signed in could then join and spend them; you can resume one on purpose. How credits are charged is on Billing.

Roles

Community membership has three roles: owner, admin, and member. Owners and admins can manage settings, members, enrichment, events, and integrations. The owner is always whoever pays for the community: the person who pays for it, or, for a community an organization pays for, the organization's owner. Other admins cannot remove or demote the owner.

On a community you pay for personally, Transfer Ownership hands it to another claimed member, who then pays for its owner-paid actions; you keep admin rights, and every personal delegation rule on the community is paused. A rule covers members only while the person who funds it pays for the community, so the previous owner's rules stop covering anyone: to cover members again, the new owner adds a New rule of their own. The transfer is refused while the new owner has no plan or free trial, or when their plan has no room for one more community: they can take a plan or the free trial, or upgrade, then take it over. It is also refused while a launch pack for the community is being paid for, or, if the community holds launch credits, while an enrichment run on it has not settled. A community an organization pays for cannot be transferred: its owner changes when the organization's owner does, and linking a community to an organization, or unlinking it, moves ownership with billing (see Organizations). Only the owner, an owner of the owning organization, or a platform admin can archive, unarchive or delete the community (see the danger zone). At least one admin or owner must always remain.

Danger zone

At the bottom of the General section, under Danger zone:

• Archive community — only for the owner, an owner of the owning organization, or a platform admin; other admins see a note saying who can. Members can no longer see or search an archived community. A banner then says it is archived, and the same people can bring it back with Unarchive, as long as its owner has a plan or free trial with room for one more community. A community archived because its plan lapsed, or by the JOGL team, cannot be unarchived here: taking a plan, or starting a free trial never used, brings back the first kind while there is room (see Billing), and support restores the second.
• 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. Like a transfer, it is refused while a launch pack for the community is being paid for, or, if the community holds launch credits, while an enrichment run on it has not settled; any launch credits it still holds expire with it. 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 section 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.