Hi everyone,

We have begun work on a series of improvements that will make it into Mahara for version 1.1. These changes are being funded by Georgia's Leadership Institution for School Improvement (GLISI), and promise to make group collaboration in Mahara much more interesting.

The changes are:

• Group Architecture Improvements: Group roles are being made more flexible - it will be possible to define (in code) new Group Types and roles that should be associated with these types. At the same time, Groups will be gaining their own files section and Views, which members can collaborate to build. The pages for Groups will be getting an overhaul in general, making them much more interesting and useful.
• Shared Artefacts: Related to the Files section that Groups will have is the new concept of Shared Artefacts. These are Artefacts that are not owned by any particular person, but rather exist in the system on their own. At any given time they can potentially be associated with a Group, but this is not necessary.
  The benefits of this are that some Artefacts will be usable by more than one user in their Views, or potentially by a Group in theirs. Furthermore, the architecture will be in place for future expansion on this idea - such as artefacts that users should be able to place in their Views but cannot edit for some reason (like certificates).

These changes will be implemented over the next month or so, in the grouptyperework branch on git.mahara.org. You are welcome to try setting up a Mahara using it, but note that at these early stages things will simply appear broken rather than improved :)

We'd like to warmly thank GLISI and Ray Merrill for their contribution, in particular in the way they have gone about collaborating with us on the design of these new features.