Listening and allowing others to be heard makes for a productive outcome. Facilitating this is essential to advance our goals. Support for working with and building groups is a way to accomplish such success. Users are provided with services that set up and enable infrastructure for groups working together.

Handling memberships in a group involves overseeing who is a member of the group, and who are the administrators, managers and moderators. There must be at least one administrator for every group. Members of a group may leave the group at any time. As the administrator you may only leave the group if at least one other administrator is designated.

Any VO community member may apply to start a new electronic collaboration group (e.g. a new "community of interest", or a "workshop planning" website).  A group is requested by answering a few questions needed to initialize your group's services (e.g. the desired security/access policies for the group).  A template for the application form is provided as a Microsoft Word attachment below.

Only group managers can broadcast a message to members of a group. A broadcast emails all group members with a copy of the message. Remember your message will be read by all of your group members. The "From" field of the message upon delivery will say it is from "cps-vo on behalf of" and your name from your profile. To broadcast a message, follow these steps:

To start a group, fill out the attached application below. Click on the button and select Contact Support. Mark the subject field as "Group request" and paste your completed application into the message body before you send.