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Start communities

Start a community to encourage people in your organization who have similar interests or goals to collaborate with one another.


Communities can be public or restricted. Public communities are visible to everyone in the organization and, depending on the level of access that you specify, can be available to everyone, or have moderated access by invitation only. Restricted communities are available only to those people added to the community as members.

To start a community...

  1. From the Public Communities tab or My Communities tab, click Start a community to open the community form.

  2. If you are not already logged in, you are prompted for a user name and password. Provide the requested information, and then click Log In.

  3. In the Community field, type a name for the community. Choose a name that identifies the purpose of the community.

  4. Specify the level of access that you want for your community:


    Community access levels
    Option Description
    This community allows public access, and anyone can join Select this option if you want the community to be public with anyone able to join.
    This community allows public access, but users must request to join Select this option if you want the community to be public but for users to request membership.
    This community does not allow public access Select this option if you want the community to be restricted, with membership by invitation only.

  5. If your administrator has enabled the use of software acquired from another vendor – for example, IBM Lotus Quickr™ Team Place, Lotus Quickr Wiki, Confluence Wiki, or Socialtext Wiki – specify whether you want to include these applications as part of your community by selecting the required application or applications in the Associated Applications area.

    If you do not see any options to include associated applications, then your administrator has not enabled this for your deployment.

  6. Type the names of people that you want to add as community members. You can search for names from your organization's Type-ahead predicts the name you are typing by comparing it to names in the that your administrator specified. If it proposes the name that you want, click to add it.

    To add community owners, click the down arrow and select Owners, then repeat the process described in this step for adding community members.

  7. Type a description of the purpose of the community in the Description field. Be as specific as possible. Identify the community's goals.

  8. Click Upload an image for your community to browse for an image to associate with the community on the overview page. The image must be 155 x 155 pixels in size, and it can be in .jpeg, .gif, or .png format.

    There are no file size restrictions. However, because the image is automatically resized to 15 KB on the Communities server to fit the allocated space in the user interface, you should keep in mind that the larger the file you upload, the longer the time the server will take to process the image.

  9. To apply a different theme to the community, click Change the theme of your community and select a theme.

  10. Type one or more tags in the Tags field. Tags are keywords that you define to provide users with more ways to identify what a community is all about. Tags must be a single word or multiple words connected with underscores or hyphens. For example, a community that deals with accessibility issues might have the tags accessibility and low-vision. Tags give users more than one way to find a community of interest. The tags you define here display to the right of the community in the All Communities view.

  11. Click Save.


Communities overviews, how-tos, and FAQs

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