iMo Communities

Visitors to this website have access to pages/resources, but not everyone has access to the same pages. Some people get to see more pages than others.
iMo is open source and open specs but only to people who are licensed iMo users. Therefore we have to hide certain resources on this website to people who are not (yet) recognized as licensed iMo users.

Authentication
Public pages are visible to everyone, even to anonymous visitors (those are visitors who are not logged in). Everybody is welcome to create a user account and log in, so there is no practical difference between an anonymous visitor and an authenticated visitor in terms of access permissions. We could change that, by moderating who are requesting login accounts, but that does not seem right to me.

All authenticated users (who are logged in) can use the public forums and can add issues to the issue tracker (or read the issue tracker).

Groups
Authenticated users can join groups, or at least can request to be joined to groups as most groups are closed. The more groups you're in, the more pages you get access to. Groups are units of people who are collectively doing something, for example there is a group for iMo architects, the group for iMo developers/testers, and the Program Board. Each group may want to have web-documents that are not visible to people who are not member of that group. When you are in 1 or more groups and you create a web-page, you can specify if this page is "public" or only visible in a selection of groups.

Groups have their own private forums in addition to the public forums.

Roles
Apart from Groups there is also the concept of "Roles". One Role is "Issue Manager", when you are an Issue Manager then you are entitked to change the status of issues, for example from "active" to "fixed" or from "active" to "postponed". Roles can be assigned to selected people regardless in which groups they are.