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What are the different types of users in a collective?

There are 4 Collectives-specific user types:

Member

Anybody can become a Member of a collective by joining it from the page for the collective. It allows the user to participate in the collective-specific leaderboard and earn the collective-specific trophies.

Members can submit articles for review by Recognized Members and Admins of the collective.

Recognized Member

Unique to Collectives is a specific user label to denote a "Recognized Member". Recognized Members could be subject matter experts from within an Organization, but could also be existing users of Stack Overflow with expertise who are recognized within the collective as subject matter experts.

All Recognized Members have the following privileges:

  • Access a private discussions space where Recognized Members and Admins can confer about matters related to the collective
  • Have the "Recognized by" label appear below their user card when making contributions that are related to the collective's technology or area of practice

Depending on the specific collective, some Recognized Members have these additional privileges:

See also: How can I become a Recognized Member?

Admin

Collectives have a finite amount of administrators. These Admins have full access to all the Collectives features, which include the ones which are described under Recognized Members.

In addition to those, they:

  • Can manage collective-level user permissions and labels, and invite new Recognized Members to the collective
  • Have access to the reporting and data within the collective
  • Can publish and edit bulletins within the collective
  • Can create, manage and delete a collection
  • Can manage the private discussions space
  • Have the ability to pin questions, articles, collections and bulletins to the top of the list on the collective's pages

Employee

For provider-specific collectives, Admins or Recognized Members can also be marked as Employees of the Organization sponsoring the collective. Employees have an "Employee" label on their user card when making contributions that are related to the collective's technology. The Employee designation does not confer any additional privileges within the collective.

Managing your role

Collective Members can manage their user role or leave a collective in user settings (Access > Your Collectives > Show new activity).

Example image of the user settings page where collective membership and other collective user settings can be managed The user settings page where collective membership and other collective user settings can be managed