Thanks for your offers
Thank you, @dorotea and @k11 for your generous offers. You are both more than acceptable facilitators to me. I believe I am roughly aligned with Nadia, Noemi, Arthur and Matthias (though honestly I have not had the chance to hear from Matthias about present tensions). They will correct me where I am wrong, and I will definitely not take it personally. I would also like to thank @emkay for putting things into a useful perspective.
@billy_smith, I am sorry that you feel that way. Private groups come out of the box with Drupal Commons, as with most social networking software. This is reasonable, because some activities need discretion (generally, with respect to people outside the community). That includes some of the work we do here: for example, collaboratively writing competitive funding applications. Even if we are happy to do it in the open, partnering organizations generally are not (in fact I already got in trouble once, for releasing an application, though it had already failed, into the recycling bin). It is not exactly a secret: instructions for creating invisible projects are in the user’s manual, accessible by clicking on “Help” in the main menu.
That said, Ben and other community members have full access to the ER LBG Administration group.
If and when we have this moderated conversation, I will be happy to explain the rationale for having this. If you want to access the Admin group yourself, I personally have no issue with it, though I will need to make sure everybody is comfortable with it.