AERPAW Users who have the PI Role can create Projects, and they become Owners of each Project they create. (Most PIs will only need to create a single Project.) As explained in Section 4.4.3, a Project is an organizational container of Experiments. The Project itself does not represent any Experiment. Experiments must be created within Projects, and an Experiment can only be created within some particular Project. Thus, for a PI User, the purpose of creating a Project is to identify a group of other AERPAW Users who will create Experiments under the aegis of this PI (that is, within this Project).
Only AERPAW Users who have at least the Experimenter Role can be added as Members to a Project.
After a PI User has created a Project, there are two ways some other AERPAW User can become a Member of that Project:
Proactive: A Project Owner of that Project can proactively search for the prospective Member, and add them to the Project; or
Reactive: The prospective Member can search for and find the Project, and request to be added - this request goes to the Project Owners of that Project, and some such Project Owner reactively approves the request. (If they decline the request, the prospective Member does NOT become a Project Member.)
When a PI User creates a Project, they can designate the Project to be one of two kinds:
Public: Any AERPAW User (who has at least the Experimenter Role) can search for and find this Project. Either the Proactive of the Reactive methods can be used to add Members to such Projects.
Private: Nobody but the Project Creator, Owners, and Members can search for and find the Project. Only the Proactive method can be used to add Members to such Projects.
Project Owners are Project Members who have management authority on the Project. The Project Creator is always a Project Owner. Any Project Owner can designate some other Project Member to be a Project Owner.
Any AERPAW User (who has at least the Experimenter Role) can view a list of Projects by clicking "Projects" on the Navigation Bar. Each User will see a list that contains (i) ALL Projects that are Public, AND (ii) any Private Projects that this User is Creator/Owner/Member of.
CAUTION: If the list is long, only the first few entries may be listed; below the list, navigation buttons (such as "Page 2 >>") allow you to visit later and earlier parts of the list. If you know the name of the Project you are looking for, you can also enter it in the "Search" box to filter down the list.
Here is an example of the List of Projects; we see that this User can see several Public Projects, and one Private Project created by this User themselves:
For Users with the PI Role, a button "Create New Project" is available at the top right of this screen. (Users with only Experimenter Role will not have this button available.)
Clicking this button brings up a screen to enter initial Project information:
Leaving the "Is Public" checkbox unchecked (the default) will result in creating a Private Project, once "Save" is clicked. The resulting screen shows the details of the Project:
Click "Back to List" to get back to the List of Projects.
You can also delete a Project from here.
CAUTION: When you delete a Project, it may have unintended consequences regarding any Experiments that have been created under that Project. In general, it will cause a cascaded delete of all such Experiments, their Sessions, saved images, etc. Unless you are quite sure that you are comfortable deleting a Project, we encourage you to schedule some time with AERPAW Operations to discuss what you are trying to do, and what you expect or intened the effect to be.
Clicking the respective "Update" button brings up a screen to search the list of AERPAW Experimenters and add specific Experimenters to the Project either as Members or as Owners; in the example below, TesterPI has searched the list of all AERPAW Experimenters by the string "tester" and come up with three results, and has selected one of them to the Project:
Clicking "Save" transfers you back to the Project details screen, showing the newly added Member:
The same screens (brought up by the "Update" buttons) can be used to remove Experimenters from Projects.
Any User who has at least the Experimenter Role can request to join any Project they can see on their List of Projects screen by using the corresponding "Join" button. This causes a request to be generated and sent to each Owner of that Project. At this time, your List of Projects will indicate that you have requested to join that Project, and the request is pending:
At this point, a Project Owner of the Project will have to respond to that pending request. They can do so by means of a section at the bottom of the List of Projects screen:
The Project Owner can either approve or deny the request. If it is approved, the original User who requested to join the Project will see the status of their request updated on their List of Projects screen:
Each of the above actions also generate messages in the form of emails, and/or Messages in the list of Messages that you can view through your User Profile screen.
A Project Creator, Owner, or Member can initiate the creation of an Experiment from the Project Details screen. This is dealt with in the next section of this User Manual.