Grants:IdeaLab/Roles

Some projects need people to take on specific kinds of roles and tasks in order to complete them.

In IdeaLab, creating participant roles is one way that you can invite people with specific kinds of skills to join your idea. This page will teach you how to edit the infobox in your Idea to specify the number and type of participants that you'd like to have join.

Available roles

Here are a few of the different types of roles that IdeaLab supports:

• Volunteer - Anyone participating in an idea. People in this role are interested in helping.
• Advisor - Acts as a mentor to the project, offering advice and assistance when you need it. People in this role generally have some prior experience to offer.
• Community organizer - Engages, communicates and facilitates community involvement in your idea. People in this role are good at communicating and coordinating systems to engage others.
• Project manager - Coordinates the project's people, schedule, and activities. People in this role often are good at coordinating details in order to accomplish the bigger picture.
• Researcher - Studies and investigates in order to find and report new knowledge for your idea. People in this role are curious about what you've learned and how you know, and they may use either quantitative or qualitative means.
• Designer - Designs the look-and-feel of products or pages, or any online interactions needed for your idea. People in this role often think deeply about the user's experience and use visual communication methods.
• Developer - Builds software or tools to engineer an idea. People in this role are also called programmers or computer engineers, and they know how to write code.

Adding new roles

By default, your infobox will always allow new volunteers to join your idea. So the rest of the instructions on this page are all optional customizations if you'd like to do more than this.

To add a spot for just 1 of any of these roles, put the following code into a new line of your infobox:

|advisor1=

|community_organizer1=

|project_manager1=

|researcher1=

|designer1=

|developer1=

Example: to make space for 3 researchers and 1 advisor to signup, you would add the following:

|researcher1=

|researcher2=

|researcher3=

|advisor1=

To fill any of those roles yourself, just add your username after the = like this:

|advisor1=User:My user name

Removing roles

Do you have enough participants already? Need to turn off the "Join" calls to action in your infobox?

• Change |more_participants=YES to =NO (NO will turn off the join button and the call to action for volunteers)
• Remove any role parameters that don't have names next to them (example: |advisor= should be deleted if you don't want the idea to show openings for new advisors)