05 — Working with other people
What you will have at the end: somebody else in your organization, holding a role you chose in one brain and nothing in the others.
What you need: a free account, an organization you own, and one other person's email address. They will have to sign in at some point for any of it to take effect.
Two levels
- An organization is who you work with. People belong to it.
- A brain is what you work on. It belongs to exactly one organization.
Belonging to the organization grants no access to anything. Not read access, not a list of your brains. What it does is make somebody available to be given a role in one of your brains.
1. Invite somebody to the organization
Open the organization menu at the top right, choose Settings…, and find the Members section. Ctrl+Shift+P and Open Organization Settings gets you to the same place.
Type their email address, pick Member or Owner, and click Invite.
- Member — belongs to the organization, can create brains in it, and can be given a role in yours.
- Owner — all of that, plus invites and removals, agents, and deleting the organization itself.
Nothing is emailed. The app copies a message to your clipboard and sending it is your job. An invite that was never sent looks the same as one that was ignored.
2. What happens on their side
If they already have an account, they are a member the next time they load the app.
If they have never signed in, the invite waits and is claimed automatically the first time they sign in with that address.
An address alone cannot be added. Until somebody has authenticated once, there is no account for a membership to attach to.
3. Give them a role in a brain
In the explorer's brain list, hover the brain, open its ⋮ menu, and choose Settings. The dialog opens on a Members section.
Every other organization member is listed with a dropdown, starting at No access. Pick Viewer, Editor or Admin.
You will not find yourself in the list, or whoever created the brain.
It takes effect immediately. If they have the app open, the brain appears in their sidebar.
Only somebody in this brain's own organization can be given a role. The picker lists nobody else, and the database refuses it even if you go around the picker.
4. What each role can do
| Viewer | Editor | Admin | Owner | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read every document in the brain | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Comment, reply, react, resolve | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Write documents, create files, upload images | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Manage who else is in the brain, and its share links | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Rename or delete the brain | ✅ |
The first row holds for every person. An agent is the exception: no agent can see into another agent's private folder, whatever role it has. Tutorial 02 covers that.
A viewer comments. Reading and commenting are the same tier, so somebody brought in to look at something can say what they think without being able to rewrite it.
Owner is not in the dropdown. It starts as whoever created the brain, and renaming or deleting it is theirs alone. An admin who manages the whole share list still cannot delete the brain. Ownership moves in one situation only: when somebody leaves the organization or is removed from it, the brains they owned pass to an organization owner.
An agent can be a viewer or an editor, never an admin. Admin is authority over who reaches the brain and what leaves it, which is not document work.
5. Working in the same document
Open the same document and have them type.
- The text arrives as it is typed. Nobody has to save for you to see it.
- A count in the status bar, bottom right, with a green dot while you are connected. Click it for Online in this brain, which lists who is here and what they have open. An agent's name carries a 🤖.
- Dots in the file explorer, against files people currently have open.
Saving is what the ● dirty dot is about, and when one of you saves it clears for everyone.
Presence fades after a couple of minutes of inactivity and returns when the person types or moves, so a quiet document reads as quiet rather than as crowded with people who left a tab open.
6. Taking it back
One brain. Set their dropdown back to No access in that brain's settings. The brain leaves their sidebar and everything else is untouched.
All of it. Remove them from the Members section of organization settings. Every role they held anywhere in the organization goes with the membership, including in brains you do not administer yourself.
Themselves. Anybody can use Leave organization…, in the danger zone or beside their own name in the member list.
Three things stop a departure:
- The last owner cannot leave. The app names the way out: invite another owner first, or delete the organization.
- Nobody can leave their last organization. Everyone belongs to at least one.
- Your own personal organization does not offer the option at all.
What you have now
An organization with somebody else in it, and one brain they can reach with exactly the authority you chose.
The shape holds as you add people: they belong to the organization, access is granted per brain, and those stay two separate decisions.