Open committee channels to your board
For school admins: the one setting that decides whether board members can read and take part in every committee channel — and why the committee is always told who's there.
Schools disagree about this one, so it’s a setting rather than a rule: should the board be able to see what committees are saying to each other? Lumicura ships with the answer off, and whichever way you set it, the committee can see the answer too.
The setting
Admin › Messages › Board visibility, one switch.
Off (the default) — board members see only the committee channels they’re actually on, the same as anyone else. A channel they haven’t joined isn’t in their list and they can’t read it.
On — every committee channel appears in a board member’s message list, and they can read it and post in it. Two things go with that, deliberately:
- The committee is told. Board members show up in each channel’s member list under Board oversight. Nobody is reading a conversation the room doesn’t know is being read.
- Their notifications don’t change. Oversight doesn’t subscribe anyone to a dozen committees’ worth of traffic — a board member gets no push or digest for these channels unless they turn one on channel by channel.
The roles this covers are the board tier — board members, treasurer, principal and school admins. A commitment chair isn’t a board officer and stays out.
Why “off” means off
It’s worth knowing what changed: this setting replaced a quieter arrangement where board members could read a committee channel they had a link to, while the channel stayed out of their list and the roster never named them. That’s the worst of both answers — access nobody can see. Now off means no access, on means visible access, and the committee can always check which it is by looking at its own member list.
Moderation is a separate road and isn’t affected either way: a reported message stays reviewable from Message moderation, and every one of those looks is recorded.
Turning it on mid-year
Switching it on takes effect immediately, and committees find out by seeing the board appear in their rosters. That’s a conversation worth having first rather than after — tell your chairs before you flip it, not because the app hides anything, but because a silent new reader feels like a surveillance story even when it’s a governance one.