[datahub-discuss] Organizations upgrade

[Ross Jones]

Hello,

A quick note about an upcoming upgrade to help us address spam and improve the managability of datahub.io.

Anybody can currently post a dataset or create a group on datahub.io, and we think this is a good thing.  However, it means that spammers can also post datasets, and they have.  Whilst we certainly don’t want to close datahub.io from contributions, we do need to make changes to dramatically reduce the amount of spam being posted and we think that the we may have a way to achieve that.

CKAN 2.0 introduced idea of “Organizations” that own/publish datasets and which can have members who can be administrators (who can add users and manage the organization) and editors (who can only add datasets to the organization). This brings many features, not the least of which are that:

 - It provides a much richer permissions and authorization structure (based around the organization) that gives users greater control over who can, or cannot,  edit and add datasets
 - It provides a clear organization-oriented structure for presenting and finding datasets
 - It will help us address spam problem by providing more control over who adds datasets as it will be a requirement that datasets are added to organizations.

We plan to enable organizations in the next few days. This will have several major effects:

 - You will only be able to create a dataset if you belong to an organization (and creating an organization at present requires approval from an Administrator)
 - Groups will be automatically migrated to organizations and the user-account that created them will be made the administrator.  If you find you don’t have as much control over your organization as you thought, please let us know!
 - If you had datasets on datahub.io that were not part of a group, they will be added to a ‘Global’ organization and we will help you move them to a new organization should you wish to move them.

The migration is likely to take about a couple of hours, and so during this time datahub.io is likely to be unresponsive. As a result it is likely that we will take the site down for a short period of time but  I’ll make sure that we notify the list should it look like it is going to take longer.

Thanks for your patience whilst we sort out the spammers, hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot less of them in the near future.

Ross