How Gathrings is organized

Three things, stacked inside each other.

Organization → Rings → Gathrings

Organization

The top level. A community as a whole: a hiking club, a cultural association, an alumni network, a congregation.

It holds the name, the description, the logo, the location — and, if money is involved, the bank details. Tickets and donations are paid to the organization, not to a ring or an event.

Most people belong to a few organizations at most.

Ring

A ring is a group inside an organization. It's where things actually happen.

A hiking club might have Weekend Walks, Thursday Evenings and Trail Maintenance. Same club, same values, three different sets of people with three different rhythms — and nobody gets notified about a 6am trail crew when they only ever come to the Sunday stroll.

Each ring has its own members, its own organizers, its own events and its own albums.

A ring is the unit you actually join. Organizations are the frame; rings are where you turn up.

Gathring

An event. A specific date, a specific place, run by a ring.

Potluck, language exchange, fundraiser, volunteer morning, rehearsal. Anything with a time and a place and people who said they'd come.

Why not just groups?

Because a community is rarely one room.

Flatten a hiking club into one group and you get a feed where every message reaches everyone. The trail crew hears about the book swap, the Sunday walkers hear about the 6am start, and eventually people mute the whole thing.

Keeping rings separate under one organization means people choose the slice that fits them, while the organization keeps a single identity, one page, one set of payment details and one membership base.

How membership works across the two

Worth knowing, because it isn't obvious:

Joining a ring makes you a member of its organization. You don't have to join the organization first and then hunt for rings. Find a ring that suits you, join it, and the organization membership follows.

That's also why leaving an organization tells you: "You can rejoin by joining one of its rings."

Who runs what

Each level has its own roles, and they don't inherit downward automatically:

So someone can organize one ring without having any say over the organization, and someone can host a single event without running the ring it belongs to. Responsibility stays where the work is — see the article on members, roles and permissions for what each can do.