### Becoming a community member

To find out about the non-hidden communities on your BSCW server,

• select GoTo Other Communities in the top menu, which presents a list of all those communities where you are not a member. You can tell by its icon whether a community is open () or closed ().

You may now become a member of such a community by

• selecting Join Community in the action menu of an open community, which immediately makes you a member, or by

• selecting Request Admission in the action menu of a closed community to ask the community manager(s) for admission to the community. This leads to an email form where you may apply for community membership.

With hidden communities, you may only become member through explicit invitation by the community manager(s).

After you have become a member, the community will disappear from the ‘Other Communities’ folder. The associated workspace will instead appear in the folder ‘Communities of your-user-name’ which contains the community workspaces of all communities where you are a member. To access this folder

• select GoTo My Communities in the top menu.

• Alternatively, you can click in the instant access bar.

The folder ‘Communities of your-user-name’ also has the entry ‘public’, containing all folders and discussion forums that have been made publicly available.

Leaving a community is only possible for community members in open communities: delete the respective community workspace in the folder ‘Communities of your-user-name’. With closed and hidden communities, you have to ask a community manager to remove you as a member from the community. You cannot delete community workspaces of closed and hidden communities from your communities’ listing yourself.