Community and event chats

Tangles supports different types of group chat. One on one chat is not possible in Tangles

Trust

Chat participants must enrol on a single device and must have a validated identity trusted by the community. Users can be logged into multiple devices but may only ever see and participate in the chat from a single device. This is to prevent unwanted and unidentified individuals either eavesdropping on or contributing to chats.

The Tangles chat system allows all participants to view the chat history, regardless of when they joined the chat and behaves like any other chat system. Where chat participants are also grouped into teams, they can view and participate in the team level chat while still seeing chat messages sent to the over-arching chat group in the same chat view.

To participate in a chat, once it has been started by an admin, each participant must enrol or be enrolled into the chat. Participants can also elect to leave the chat unless it is an event chat and the event is running (since these are assumed to be used for safety)

Community chat bubbles

These can be created with any community members. From the community view in the app or the web interface, select ‘Community chat bubbles’ and add a new one. You can select whether to create a member chat and or a parent chat. In the latter case, it is the registered parents of the included members who will see the chat.

Team chats

Community chat bubbles can also have teams which include a subset of the members of the main bubble.

These teams can re-use existing community defined teams or be created in an ad-hoc fashion from the bubble’s members.

The advantage of creating teams grouped under a single bubble is that members of a team can receive messages sent to their team but also those sent to the main bubble and can see those in the same chat view on their devices.

It is possible for members to belong to multiple teams.

Event chats

When enabled, the event chat automatically includes all participants. As with community bubbles, parent chats can also be enabled which creates a separate group chat based on the registered parents of the event participants.

Event teams can also have chat enabled and work in exactly the same way as community chat bubbles.

Teams in events are also used for route planning and tracking.

Event facilitators and adults in youth chats

Each community defines the number of adults or trusted event facilitators that must be in a group chat when there are any youth members participating. If there are no youth members in any chat, there is no restriction of adults or facilitators. When a single youth participant joins a chat, if the number of adult participants in the chat is below the defined minimum, the adults are temporarily removed from the chat.

For the purposes of these controls, members must both be registered for the relevant chats (event, community or team) and for event based chats must also be enrolled on a valid device. If no youth members are enrolled at any given time, there will be no limit on adult participants.

For events, facilitators are added automatically to chats when they enrol. This enables them to see all team and event chats without adding them to each of the event teams.

Multiple chats in a single view

Particularly for events or community chat bubbles with multiple teams, there could be a number of chat groups that facilitators may wish to monitor. Similarly, it is likely that participants in a given team will need to monitor the event level chat as well as their own team chat.

Tangles automatically shows incoming messages from the top level event or community bubble in any team chat. To reply to an event message, the participant taps on the message which brings up the relevant top level chat view.

Participants and facilitators can also select which of the chat views available to them they can see in any of their chat views. For example, a facilitator could use the main event chat view to communicate during the event but also monitor a subset of the team chats in the same view, with another facilitator monitoring other teams.

Regardless, all available group chats are visible in the main app home page in the same manner as any other chat application.

Communicating with parents

Both community chat bubbles and event chats support enabling of parent chats. Simply by enabling them in the relevant chat configuration view. These can be enabled or disabled at any time.

Tangles Events