Help:Project Accounts
Categories: Project Leader Help
Topical projects (projects that cover profiles, as opposed to functional projects such as Greeters, Rangers, etc.) use project accounts for project-managed profiles.
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Purpose
Groups of members working collaboratively in projects have essentially functioned as Profile Managers for massively-common or historically-significant ancestors for as long as WikiTree has had Projects. In fact, this was the original reason we created projects.
With project accounts, projects are now literally set as the manager of profiles they cover.
As the manager, the project e-mail list gets the merge requests, Trusted List requests, alerts when comments are posted on profiles, and the weekly activity feed summary.
Other Benefits
Project activity feed
Since the project account is managing the profiles they all appear on the project account's Watchlist. This means that the project account's Watchlist Activity Feed functions as a Project Activity Feed — it shows all the current activity on the Project Managed Profiles and PPPs.
For example:
Simpler contact from non-members
Project accounts make it easier for people who aren't project members to contact the group. They can post a note on the project account profile or on any profile it manages and all members on the project e-mail list will see it.
Encouraging activity by project members
The activity on the e-mail list helps keep project members involved. The Activity Feed also creates a focus for member activity, e.g. members can share monitoring duties and discuss changes on the e-mail list.
Bot usage
Some projects may be able to run bots on their project Watchlist to apply templates or modify certain attributes.
Unconnected Tool usage
A project account has a list of unconnected profiles just like normal account profiles. This means projects can focus on working on those profiles that need additional research.
Following tags
The project account can follow tags that are important to the project, which will show up in the daily updates sent to the email group.
Usage Rules
WikiTree has a strict rule that profiles must represent real, individual human beings. Project account profiles represent one of the few exceptions to this rule. Therefore, we must be very careful with their usage.
Project-managed profiles must have the project box
When a profile is managed by a project account, it must have the project box.
Project-managed profiles are the only profiles that should have the project box. Project boxes and project management go together.
Project-protected profiles must be project-managed
All project-protected profiles (PPPs) must be project-managed profiles (PMPs).
However, not all project-managed profiles must be project-protected. Those extra protections are reserved for profiles that need them and meet the protection criteria.
Other managers are allowed
Profiles can have more than one manager. If a profile is project-managed, you may or may not wish to remove other managers. See Profile Manager. Others can also remain on the Trusted List.
Activity while logged into the account
Although the account will appear as the manager of profiles, it should not be used as an active account except where absolutely necessary. Activity should still be done by individual members under their individual accounts.
There are some situations where the account will have to be the one "making" the changes, like approving merges for private profiles or Trusted List requests.
If Leaders or Project Coordinators are working on WikiTree using the project account, they must sign in by posting a quick message on the project account's public comments section saying they're signed in. The post will show their name, date, and time. This way everyone can keep track of who was actually making changes.
One way many Leaders manage this without signing in-and-out constantly is to use different browsers. That is, they open their own account in their preferred browser and open the project account in a different one, e.g. one in Chrome and one in Firefox.
Creating Project Accounts
Any top-level project or sub-project that manages profiles must have a project account.
A sub-project should use the top-level project's Project Account and template to manage profiles until they have at least two upper-level volunteers as part of the project (Leaders and Project Coordinators), have at least three other regular project members, and will end up actively managing at least 200 profiles.
Profiles cannot be managed by or Teams or free-space projects. Therefore, they do not need project accounts. Those projects should speak with their top-level project about the protection and management of important profiles.
The account must be created by a Team Member, the Project Manager. Send them a message to get the process started.
Creating a project account requires an e-mail address for the project. This is a Google Group e-mail list address created by the Team.
The Project Leader(s) and Project Coordinator(s) should be set as the Profile Managers of the profile account. Other project members can communicate using the Project's Google Group, which can either be a separate Google Group of the Project Account's Google Group, at the Project's discretion.
Examples
WikiTree-2 is the account for the Acadians Project.
A G2G post on what projects do with these accounts. This is a great way to answer members' questions and get them asking more about what's going on so the whole community can benefit and understand.
For all existing project accounts, click here.
This page was last modified 16:22, 18 July 2022. This page has been accessed 7,220 times.