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Discover & joining

Discover is the public catalog of projects on a AfriAnnotate deployment — how a community finds work and how a project finds its community. It renders as the second tab of the Projects page (and the landing surface for users without an organization), with the same grid/list views as My Projects: cards in grid mode; aligned columns (tasks, contributors, date, organization) in list mode.

A language progress strip at the top shows how far each declared language has come — clips collected and percentage crowd-validated across public projects (details).

Making a project discoverable​

Project Settings → Visibility:

  • Visibility: public — the project appears in Discover.
  • Contribution mode: open (anyone joins) or members-only (visible, but joining is closed).
  • Join mode: auto (join takes effect immediately) or review (a join becomes a request the owner approves or declines; a pending request grants no task access).
  • Max contributors — optional capacity cap; only active contributors consume it.
  • Allow on mobile — per-project control of phone exposure, so a desktop-only workflow never strands a mobile user in a project they can't use. Mobile Discover only lists mobile-allowed projects, enforced server-side.

What joining actually does​

Joining is deliberately lightweight for the contributor and deliberately safe for the project:

  1. The join dialog shows the project's consent requirements — full agreement bodies, granular purposes, optional age/country attestations — and contributors sign them in the flow. No signature, no join; enforced again at annotation time server-side.
  2. The contributor becomes a project contributor — a lightweight affiliation distinct from organization membership: they can annotate (and see only their own work), but hold no org permissions and cost the org nothing. Org members who already have access are told so instead of double-joining.
  3. Joining through a facilitator's invite link attributes the contributor to that coordinator's cohort — first touch wins, and an invalid link still joins, just unattributed (Facilitators).

Leaving is one click and removes the affiliation only — submitted work stays attributed for audit and review, and a contributor can always see their own statement (Contributions & payment).

Owner-side roster​

Project Settings → Members → Contributors lists the roster: active contributors, pending join requests (approve / decline), removal, and facilitator appointment (Facilitators). Removing a contributor never deletes their annotations.

Offline behavior​

Discover reads from the last-seen cache when offline, so browsing keeps working; joining is an online act by design (it signs consent and mutates cloud state) and the join button says so rather than half-working.