People & roles

Inviting the family in, and what each role can see and do.

A collective is its people, and the owner's real job is casting: deciding who stands on which rung. Admin → People is where it happens - attach a person, set their role, change it as trust and appetite grow.

The People admin page: the collective's members with their roles, and controls to add, change or remove — The cast list: everyone in the collective, their role, and the controls to change it.

Casting the roles

A useful way to hold the ladder in your head - trust grows inward:

Role	Give it to…
Guest	Someone at the threshold - a family friend, a cousin trying it out. Sees only what's deliberately shared outward.
Outer circle	The wider family: sees more, still not the household's own layer.
Inner circle	Close family who read deeply but don't write - grandparents are often happiest here.
Member	The tellers. Everything shared with the collective, plus the whole Creating track.
Admin	A member you trust with the keys to people and lists - a co-parent, an older child grown into it.
Owner	Whose place it is. Every power, including making other owners.

Who can change whom: owners can grant any role. Admins can manage the rungs below admin - they can't touch other admins or owners. Nobody can remove the last owner; the collective always has someone whose place it is.

Roles are per-collective. The same person can be owner of their own archive, member of yours, and inner circle of a grandparent's - each collective casts them fresh.

When someone's connected, they get an email saying so, and the collective's welcome story greets their first visit - worth keeping warm (Housekeeping). A friendly read-only roster also lives at Members, for everyone to see who's who without the controls.