Community Tasks (Action Items)

Communities run on small jobs: printing flyers for the street festival, picking up the projector, updating the website, welcoming a new member. Action items are your community's shared task list — and when organizers share a task with the community, any member can pick it up. No committee membership required, no permission to ask for.

Where you'll find tasks

There are two places to discover work you can help with:

• The Help wanted box on your community board. When there are shared tasks waiting for someone, the board shows the most urgent ones right between the search bar and the content feed, each with a Claim button. When everything's claimed, the box quietly disappears.
• The Action items tab under Organization in the side menu. This is the full list: the Available filter shows every shared task you could take on, and Mine shows what's currently yours.

Claiming a task

See something you can do? Click Claim. From that moment the task is yours:

• It's assigned to you, and moves from Available to Mine.
• Whoever created the task gets a notification that you've taken it on.
• Nobody else can claim it while you hold it — one task, one pair of hands.

If two people click Claim at the same moment, one of them wins and the other sees a friendly note that the task was just taken. No harm done.

Changed your mind, or ran out of time? Open the task and release it — it goes straight back to the available pool for someone else to pick up.

Working on a task

Once a task is yours, you're in charge of its status:

• Mark it in progress when you start, and done when you finish.
• Tasks can have a due date. If yours slips past it, you'll get a gentle overdue reminder — once, not a daily drumbeat.
• Your notifications link straight to the task, so you can update it in two clicks.

You don't need any special role to update a task assigned to you — that's true whether you claimed it yourself or an organizer assigned it to you directly.

Why can't I see a task someone mentioned?

Every action item has a visibility:

• Shared with the community — visible to all members, claimable by anyone. These are the tasks you'll see in the Help wanted box and the Available list.
• Internal — visible only to the community's organizers (and to the person the task is assigned to). Organizers use these for work that isn't ready to hand off.

So if an organizer mentions a task you can't find, it's probably still internal. Once they share it, it shows up for everyone.

For organizers

Creating tasks, assigning them, sharing them with the community, and the role permissions behind all of this are covered in the Council Meetings & Leadership Workspace guide — including how tasks captured inside a council meeting stay private to the meeting's circle. To give a role task permissions, see Understanding Roles & Permissions.

Related help

• Council Meetings & Leadership Workspace — creating, assigning, and sharing tasks as an organizer
• Understanding Roles & Permissions — the permissions that control who manages tasks
• Understanding Community Content — everything else on your community board