Share & Collaborate: 'OneMap' Good Practices

Special Considerations for Organization Administrators

 Integrated geospatial infrastructure  is the modern pattern for connecting organizations across borders, jurisdictions, and sectors to address shared challenges. Implementation starts with a strategy, followed by the pillars of collaborative governance, data and technology, capacity building, and engagement. It is inherently multi-organizational. 

Whether you call your initiative Open Data, Regional GIS, Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), Digital Twin, Knowledge Infrastructure, Digital Ecosystem, or otherwise, collaboration is key.

Throughout these guides, we use the term "OneMap" as a placeholder for your community GIS branding.

This guide shares good practices to share and collaborate among multiple partners in your OneMap initiative. You’ll learn to create a great group-sharing experience for your contributing partners, invite partners to groups, index groups to your Hub, and populate your OneMap Contributors page with category cards.


Overview of sharing & collaboration

If you are looking to collaborate with others using ArcGIS Online, there are three patterns that you can adopt:

  1. Traditional sharing
  2. Partnered collaboration
  3. Distributed collaboration

Groups are a feature of ArcGIS organizations that help you organize, share, and secure content items.

Traditional Sharing using Groups

Collaborations are based on a foundation of trust between participating organizations and are typically motivated by common goals and initiatives. Traditional sharing makes it easy for partners to share their authoritative content. It is the simplest collaboration pattern in ArcGIS Online. We recommend traditional sharing as a starting point for your community Hub – it is the focus of this guide.

Groups form collaboration spaces where organizations and individuals can share open and secure data, maps, apps, workflows, and other content. The OneMap Hub approach suggests creating separate groups for each of your contributing partners to share content. But keep in mind that ArcGIS is a flexible system – this is just one possible way to organize content for your Hub. Choose a content management strategy that best fits your organization.

Traditional sharing enables those with an ArcGIS Online organization account to share. Group members can be from your organization, or from an external ArcGIS Online organization so long as their user profiles are public.

Partnered Collaboration

Partnered collaboration is a more closely coupled relationship between two or more ArcGIS Online organizations. When organizations create a partnered collaboration, they enter a partnership that allows their members to work closely with each other and each other's content, including some editing privileges.

Learn more about  Partnered Collaboration .

Distributed Collaboration

Distributed collaborations can be useful for many workflows, including exposing ArcGIS Enterprise content to the public through ArcGIS Online, making data visible across different departments in an organization, and managing field data collections. Distributed collaboration is a common pattern for organizations participating in whole-of-government and whole-of-business initiatives.

Enterprise supports intra-organizational collaboration among offices and agencies. There is no single pattern for a distributed collaboration, so you can implement it in the way that best suits your needs.


While partnered and distributed collaboration may ultimately be part of your workflow, the remainder of this guide focuses on traditional sharing. Next, we’ll explore how to create a great group-sharing experience for your contributing partners.


1 Create Partner Shared Content groups

When you use ArcGIS Hub and deploy a Hub template, a 'Hub Content Group’ is created for you in your ArcGIS Online account. This Group is automatically indexed by your Hub and cannot be removed. Content added to this Group will automatically appear in your Hub catalog.

Next, you’ll create Shared Content Groups in ArcGIS Online to collaborate and share with your partners.

ArcGIS Online users tend to have multiple groups. Help your partners quickly and easily distinguish your groups from their own by providing a great group-sharing experience.

GOOD PRACTICE: Create a great group-sharing experience for you and your partners.

What does a great group-sharing experience look like?

We think it’s an experience that clearly identifies your groups and their purpose, and helps partners understand how they work. For example, as staff change over time, will new users be able to understand the purpose of the group?

Make the group's Item information self-documenting so it can be understood by those that need it. These are the details that your partners will appreciate!

Group Naming Convention

Follow a straightforward naming convention that distinguishes your groups from others.

GOOD PRACTICE: Follow a naming convention, such as:[Our OneMap] Partner Shared Content

Replace [Our OneMap] with your initiative’s name; replace [Partner] with their jurisdiction or organization/agency name.

Create separate sharing groups for each of your partners, for example:

  • “OneMap Washington County Shared Content”
  • “OneMap San Madrid Shared Content”

Thumbnail image

Make your Groups shine! Add a thumbnail image that represents your community branding.

Groups display their thumbnail image in ArcGIS Online group listings and when featured in group galleries.

TIP: Use your logo, Hub banner image, or custom icon to make the group clearly identifiable.


Summary

GOOD PRACTICE: The summary should be succinct yet descriptive, letting your partners know what the group is about.

EXAMPLE: “This group enables partners of [Our OneMap] to share content and easily work together in a common collaboration space.”

Description

The Description is an opportunity to point partners to guidance and good practices for authoritative data providers.

GOOD PRACTICE: The group’s description should help your partners easily understand how to get their shared content into your OneMap Hub, and who to contact if they have questions.

For example, include the following elements:

  • Good practices for shared content
  • How content sharing works
  • Who to contact for more information.

See it in practice:

Group Settings

In the ArcGIS Online Group, click on the Settings tab and review the following:

Delete Protect

Enable delete protection to prevent the group from being accidentally deleted.

Group membership

We suggest the following settings for Partner Shared Content Groups participating in open data initiatives:

  • Allow everyone (public) to view the group
  • Any organization’s members can be in the group
  • People can join the group by invitation
  • All group members can contribute content.

Designate Group as open data

Enable Open data.

NOTE: Open data is a key capability. When enabled, the group can be accessed by other organizations and its content can be indexed via the Hub Groups Manager.


2. Invite partners to a group

Next, invite partners. You can search for users from external ArcGIS Online organizations so long as their user profiles are public.

Search users

In the Group's Member tab, toggle the following filters:

  • Enable ‘Search all ArcGIS Online organization members’
  • Disable ‘Collaboration coordinators only’

How Sharing works

Hub uses ArcGIS Online open data groups to index content in the Hub Content Library (i.e., your Hub catalog). Here's how sharing works:

Administrator invites Partner to a Group

Partner accepts the invitation and the Group appears in the partner's Group listing.

The Group is a space for sharing and collaboration

Partner shares their authoritative content to the Shared Content Group via the Item's 'Share' setting.

Shared content automatically flows to Hub

When enabled for open data and indexed by Hub, content from the Group automatically appears in the Hub catalog.

Your partner’s shared content appears in the group.

3. Index the groups to your Hub

Hub Groups Manager

In the Hub Administrative console, navigate to the Groups Manager.

Click the left side button to Add Groups.

Search and find the relevant groups in your organization, then check the box to add each to your Hub.

Additionally, you can also add groups from other organizations, so long as they have been designated as Open Data.

Click Add. The content of the groups is automatically indexed in your Hub catalog.

Visitors to your Hub site catalog explore content contributed by you and your partners:


Next steps

This guide shared good practices to share with your partners in a collaborative Hub.

If you are using the OneMap Hub template, the following guide in this collection describes how to implement the Hub template.

Throughout these guides, we use the term "OneMap" as a placeholder for your community GIS branding.