CityTools teams, social groups like the real world

Anyone can create teams on CityTools

  • We think our team concept -- first unveiled last fall in Europe -- is very exciting and has great potential for people
  • It takes all of about 15 seconds to create a team. And a team can unite any group of people who share an interest -- groups of people within a company, family members, activist organization, friends, sport nuts, civic organizations, you name it.
  • Teams can be set up to allow anyone to join, or limited to a secret passcode that gives the owner full control over who joins.
  • Whoever owns a team can control the membership and has the ability to drop a member -- for example for disruptive behavior -- or even ban them, which drops a person, damages their prestige within the CityTools reputation system and prevents them from signing up again even if the team is open to the public.
  • Team managers may close a team to new members at any time simply by changing its status with a mouse click.
  • All team members can choose to assign stories to a team and, if the creator chooses, permit other team members to edit their content.
  • In other words, in a formal setting -- say a school journalism program, or a non-profit organization -- a team could be created and the reporters save drafts that the editors approve and release for publication. With CityTools, it's easy to bring together groups of people for an organized publishing workflow.
  • Any content on CityTools -- original stories, shared stories, lists and soon photos and multimedia -- may be assigned to a team.

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Clever ways to use teams

Civic groups publish online
using our teams

Use teams to make a
school newspaper





You make the team, we'll make it easy to find your work

  • Any story on CityTools that has been assigned to a team always carries a link to allow readers to see all of that team's published output in any time frame.
  • In addition, when reading team content, a box appears next to the content with other team stories.
  • The most active teams of the week show up at the top of CityTools listing pages.
  • And, well, there's more... read on..

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Put your team content on your own web site!

  • You read that right. All CityTools teams get a couple of pieces of simple code (either javascript or php, you choose) that allows the headlines of their team content to show up on their own website!
  • This means you can use CityTools to write stories or lists or manage shared story links and have the results show up on your own web site. For organizations that have a hard time updating their websites this feature promises to provide you with an easy dynamic experience.
  • And if you understand CSS style sheets, you can fully style the results to match the look and feel of your web page. Our only requirement is that you keep the powered by CityTools line intact.
  • Put it all together and you can use CityTools to publish a full online newspaper on your own site, if you choose! Have multiple teams representing different categories, etc.

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And all teams have their own RSS channel too!

  • All teams automatically get their own RSS channel!
  • Links to encourage people to subscribe to your teams channel are found in team headline boxes as well as our "team locator" page.
  • The team locator box allows the public to search for teams based on text in the title or description, the number of stories, number of members, time, etc.
  • If your organization or club has thought of how great it would be to push information out to the public via RSS but has been held back by the complexity of it - the wait is over. Simply manage your content online at CityTools and you automatically get an RSS feed!

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return to the main public features overview
Tips!
click on an item below for more info

Where can I find information on the publisher's network?

The features overview can be found here.

If you're interested in the Howtos and quick guides -- including the 15-minute fast track guide -- to using the networks, you can find that here

Where can I find out about features of the free CityTools public tools?

The overview page can be found here

The howtos for teams, writing stories and lists may be found on the menu rail under "Docs and Howtos."

I've got to have this! Where do I sign up?

We were hoping you'd ask that!

You can sign up for an individual account here which is free for everyone.

If you want to sign up for our paid publisher services you may do so here, but you need to sign up for an individual account first.