Crisis Response Teams
Wiki ▸ Documentation ▸ User Documentation ▸ Crisis Response Teams
- Released in version: 0.1
- Also called: "Teams"
Crisis Response Teams (or just Teams, for short) are where Alerts get sent and define the basic unit of organizing incident response actions. A Team is essentially a list or grouping of other users whom an individual can contact en-masse when they need to. It is a good idea to create different Teams for different purposes, and organize your Teams in a way that makes sense for you.
- Accessing your Crisis Response Teams
- My Teams
- Adding a new Crisis Response Team
- Editing a Crisis Response Team
- Team membership
- Advanced Team features
To access your Teams page, first login to your account if you are not already logged in. (This process may differ slightly from one Buoy-enabled website to another.) Then, do this:
- Tap on or click the "My Teams" link in the left-hand Dashboard menu.
From this link you can access all your Buoy Team settings, including both Teams you own and others' Teams you have joined.
The "My Teams" page shows all Teams you own, along with some basic information about each Team. Each Team is its own row, and basic stats for each Team are shown across multiple columns. You can sort your Teams listing by clicking on the column header for the stat you want to sort by. For instance, you can quickly find Teams with the most or fewest members on them by clicking on the "Members" column. Clicking on the same column header again will reverse the sort order.
When you first create your Buoy account, you will have three default Teams created for you, named Friends, Family, and Neighbours. You can use these Teams as-is, edit them to suit your needs, or delete them and create new Teams to replace them with.
The Title column shows the name of your Team. The Team's title is displayed when choosing which Team(s) to send an alert to, so it should be short and briefly describe the purpose of the Team.
The Date column shows you when you last made changes to this Team.
The Members column shows a count of the total number of other users who you have invited to join this Team. This count includes people who have not yet accepted your invitation.
The Confirmed Members column shows a count of confirmed Team members. These are other users who you have invited and who have accepted your invitation to join the Team. Only confirmed members can receive alerts that you send, so this is among the most important pieces of information about a Team.
The Default Team? column shows a Yes or No depending on whether the given Team is pre-selected to receive alerts you send.
- If a team is a default Team (marked with
Yesin this column), then the confirmed members of that Team will receive alerts unless you explicitly deselect the Team(s) they're on when sending an alert. - If the Team is not a default Team (marked with
Noin this column), then in order for its confirmed members to receive an alert, you must send a contextual alert and make sure this Team is selected.
You can change whether a Team is marked as default at any time by editing the Team itself.
Each time you want to make a new Crisis Response Team, you need to access the Add New Team page. The Add New Team page is only accessible after you have already logged in to your account. Once logged in, there are several ways you can access the Add New Team page:
- From New Content menu in the admin bar, tap or click the "Crisis Response Team" menu item:
- From the My Teams page, press the "Add New" button:
- From the Dashboard menu, tap on or hover over the "My Teams" menu item, then tap on or click the "Add New" menu item:
All three of these options leads you to the Add New Team page, where you can create a new Crisis Response Team. The following screenshot shows the initial state of the Add New Team screen. In addition to entering a Title and choosing publication options, different boxed areas of this screen enable you to invite (add) new Team members, view or remove existing members, and toggle whether or not this Team will be included in your default Teams list.
The Enter team name here text box allows you to type the name or title of your Team.
The Add new member box contains a single text field where you can type the username or email address of a person you want to invite to join this Team. If you don't know the username or email address of the person you want to invite, you can tap on or click inside of the field to reveal a drop-down list of options. The options that appear here are other users who have set their Buoy crisis response preference to publish their presence. You can still invite people who don't show up in this list to join your Team.
See Assembling a crisis response Team for detailed instructions on inviting others to join your Team.
The Current team members box shows which users are on this Team, their total number, and their invitation status (either confirmed or pending). This box also lets you remove team members by checking the box next to the usernames you want to remove. Leaving one of these boxes unchecked retains that Team member (making no changes to their status).
The Default Team? box contains a single control you can use to toggle whether this Team is included in your default Teams list on the My Teams page. Checking this box will make this Team automatically pre-selected when sending an alert. Unchecking this box means that you will need to explicitly address alerts to this Team when you send new alerts.
The Publish box is where you confirm the changes you've made in your Team. It also displays the Team status (typically Draft or Published), and visibility (typically Public or Private). You can only actually send alerts to Teams that have been Published (not Draft Teams).
Don't forget to press the Publish, Update, or Save button in this Publish box after you make any changes to your Team!
To make changes to an existing Team, tap on or click the Team's title from the My Teams page. This will take you to the Edit Team page, which functions in the same way as the Add New Team page described in Adding a new Crisis Response Team.
The Team Membership page shows you the Teams you have been invited to join as well as the Teams whose invitations you accepted. It does not display Teams you own (use the My Teams page to see the Teams you created). On this page you can also accept Team invitations and remove yourself from Teams you previously joined.
To access the Team Membership page, tap on or hover over the "My Teams" menu item of the Dashboard menu, then tap on or click the "Team membership" menu item, as shown here:
This item links to the Team Membership page, shown below:
When you are invited to a join a Team, your invitation will be displayed as a row in a table on this page, as shown here:
After joining a Team, the "Join Team" link is replaced with a "Leave Team" link. Tapping or clicking on "Leave Team" will remove you from the Team.
The Team Name column displays the name of the Team you have been invited to join.
The Alerter column displays the name of the person whose Team this is. This is the person from whom you will receive alerts addressed to that Team.
The Confirmed column displays Pending if you were invited but have not yet joined the Team, or Confirmed if you have accepted the invitation and are a confirmed Team member. You will only receive alerts from Teams marked Confirmed.
If you have completed your User profile, you will have access to additional Team features. These advanced, optional features are described elsewhere in this guide: