Due to the growing user base using the Collaboratory services, there is now a requirement to introduce new policies around the use of certain resources. In the short term, we will be relying on user cooperation to ensure these policies are followed, in time however, we shall be introducing code changes to enforce these requirements

Public vs Private collabs

It is important to note the differences between public and private collabs before discussing policy on them. What is the main difference between these collab types?

Public

Public collabs are, by default and by design, viewable by everyone using the Collaboratory, this includes people that do not have an EBRAINS account. As well as this, for users who use the Collaboratory.Lab, a public collab will show up by default in their “Shared” folder while they use the lab. 
 Public collabs are not the default type for collabs and should only be used if you have a real use case for them. The intention is that public collabs are to be used infrequently and only for collabs that need to be shared with everyone, including the general public. For any other use cases, private collabs should be used.

Private

Private collabs are collabs that will only be viewable by the people you decide need to view it. They will not be accessible by anyone without an account and they will not appear in the “Shared” folder of people who have not been specifically added to the collab.

 Private collabs should be the default collab used when creating a new collab unless you have a strong reason to create a public collab.

New policies

Due to the large number of unnecessary public collabs, which are appearing in everybody’s shared libraries, making relevant collabs harder to find and in general causing clutter , we are introducing new policies to encourage the appropriate setting for collabs going forward.

Public collabs review

Going forward, the Collaboratory team may start reviewing public collabs. If we feel that a collab should not be public, we will request the creator to make it private unless they have a strong reason not to do so.

User public collab count

The Collaboratory team may also be counting how many public collabs each user has. If a user has too many unnecessary public collabs, they will be asked to reduce this number to a reasonable amount and be requested to avoid this in the future (Unless they have a good reason of course).

File size limits

As well as the above, we will also be introducing limits to the file size for Drives. Files of a maximum size of 1GB will be allowed on the Drive going forward, files bigger than this will be removed, we advise users to use the Buckets provided by the Collaboratory for larger files.

Consequences

If a user violates the above policies after already being corrected, we will issue a warning to that user. If the user continues to violate these policies even after a warning, we may restrict the ability of that account, including the ability to create public collabs .

Collaboratory changes

The Collaboratory team will also be making changes to help assist with these new policies.

• During collab creation, private collabs are already selected by default, we will also be adding a popup when users attempts to choose public to ensure that this is what you really want to do.
• Further down the line, we will be introducing quotas for users, limiting the amount of public collabs they can have as well as their storage space in the Drive.
• Prohibiting the upload of files greater than 1GB to the Drive.

There may be other changes we make to assist with these changes. 

Requests

Bearing the above polices in mind, we request that all users with a public collab check that the collab should actually be public, if it should not, it would be greatly appreciated if the user can change that collab to private. You can do this by going to the landing page of a collab and clicking on the “Settings” option, you can then select “Private” collab in the settings page and save the change, your collab is now private.

Another request going forward would be to create only the amount of collabs you need and to avoid creating a new collab unless absolutely neccessary. An example to illustrate this issue:

User A is having a workshop to demonstrate how their “Test service” works, User A will create a collab called “Workshop - Date 1” and use this collab. Later on, User A wants to have another workshop so they create another collab called “Workshop - Date 2” and use this collab for their second workshop.

This duplication could easily be avoided by creating a collab called “Test service ” and creating a navigation element called “Workshops” which could then contain further navigation elements “Workshop 1” and “Workshop 2” respectively.

3 collabs (The service collab, workshop 1 and workshop 2) have now been reduced to a single, organised collab where users can now visit and find all of the information in a single collab.