People & the org chart

What the People page is

Every space has a People page listing everyone in the organization — not only the members of that space. It is the answer to "who is this person and what do they do", without leaving the workspace to find an HR system.

It has three views:

• Directory — everyone, with their name, their title, their avatar and their follower count.
• Follow Coworkers — people you are not following yet, with suggestions.
• Org Chart — who reports to whom.

The directory

The directory lists the whole organization, sorted by name. Each entry shows the person's title, whether you follow them, and how many followers they have.

People who have been invited to the organization but have not signed up yet appear too, marked as pending, so you can tell "not here" from "not yet here".

The directory can be exported to CSV.

Titles and managers

Two fields are set inside Openbook rather than at the account service, because they are about this organization's shape rather than the person:

• Title — what they do.
• Manager — who they report to.

Setting either requires write access in the space. They feed the org chart, where each person shows their title and how many people report to them.

Following

Following a coworker is a lightweight way to keep an eye on what someone is working on. It is symmetrical with nothing: following someone does not notify them, does not give you access to anything, and does not require their agreement.

The Follow Coworkers view suggests people you are not following. Each suggestion shows up to three colleagues who already follow them, which is usually a better reason to follow someone than their job title.

Following and unfollowing are idempotent — clicking twice does not stack.

Birthdays

A birthday is a month and a day, with no year. You can set your own; changing someone else's requires write access.

Openbook shows whose birthday is today and the next five coming up, so the team can mark them without anybody keeping a spreadsheet. The year is deliberately not collected — it is not needed to say happy birthday.

Tips

• Fill in titles before managers. An org chart of untitled boxes is less useful than a directory with titles and no chart.
• Let people set their own birthday. Anybody can set theirs, and it is the one field where asking is more awkward than waiting.
• Use the pending entries as an onboarding checklist. A name that has been pending for two weeks is an invitation that went to the wrong address.

FAQ

Is this the same as the organization's member list? It is the same people, shown differently. Who is in the organization is decided at the Bookbag account — see Members & access. This page adds the things Openbook knows: titles, managers, follows and birthdays.

Does following someone give me access to their work? No. Access comes from workspace scope, space membership and room visibility, and following changes none of them.

Why is the directory the whole organization rather than the space? Because the question it answers — who is this person — is an organization-level question. Which spaces they can reach is a separate matter.