Channel Invitations (per-channel roles + who-can-post, in Team Chat)

What it is

In Team Chat, a channel isn't automatically open to everyone in your workspace — you choose who's in it, what each person can do, and who's allowed to post. Every channel member has one of three roles (Manager, Member, or Read-only), and a channel can be set so that everyone may post or only managers may. It's the Slack-style "invite people to a channel, give them a role" model, built into Omniscio.

Where to find it

Everything on this page lives inside a channel in Team Chat, in the Members panel that slides in down the right-hand side — there is no separate settings page for it. You reach that panel from the channel itself, so open the channel first and look at its header.

Where it lives

Open any channel and click the member count at the top (e.g. "5 members"). That opens the Members panel down the right side, listing everyone in the channel with their role.

• Add someone: in the Members panel, click Add members (the person-plus button). A dialog — "Add members to #channel-name" — lets you search your workspace and pick people. You can add up to 50 people at once and choose whether each joins as a Member or Read-only. Adding is instant (Slack-style): there's no invite-accept step — the person is in the channel right away, and a small system line ("Alex added Sam to the channel") records it.
• Change a role or remove someone: each row in the Members panel has the controls to change a person's role or take them out of the channel.

The management controls (add / change role / remove) appear only for people who can use them — a workspace admin or a channel Manager. Everyone else sees the member list read-only.

How it behaves

The three roles

• Manager — full control of the channel. Can post, add and remove members, change other people's roles, and change the channel's settings (including who can post). A channel always keeps at least one manager — you can't remove or demote the last one.
• Member — the everyday role. Can read everything and post messages and replies, but can't manage members or settings. This is the default role when someone joins an open channel.
• Read-only — can read the whole channel and add reactions, but can't post. In place of the message box they see a small banner: "You have read-only access to this channel."

Who can post

A channel manager or workspace admin can open the channel's Edit dialog and set Who can post:

• Everyone (the default) — every member can post, except Read-only members, who never post.
• Managers only — only managers can post. Everyone else can still read and react, but their message box is replaced by a banner: "Only managers can post in this channel."

Turning it on

Channel Invitations is a shipped feature — it's on by default, so the Members panel, roles, and who-can-post control are simply present in Team Chat. (Team Chat itself is the container: if you don't see channels at all, Team Chat may still need enabling in Settings → Lab.) The developer/QA flag AMC_SHOW_CHANNEL_INVITATIONS=1 and the channelInvitationsEnabled setting also force it on.

For agents

Under the hood

• Roles live in a Firestore subcollection: …/channels/{channelId}/channelMembers/{uid} holds { uid, role, addedBy, addedAt }, and the channel doc keeps a denormalized memberUids index plus a postingPermission field ('everyone' | 'managers-only'). Pre-feature members with no subcollection doc are lazily backfilled as 'member'.
• The read-only / managers-only composer swap is decided by resolveComposerReadOnly(), which renders the ReadOnlyBar in place of the composer. Enforcement is ALSO in firebase/firestore.rules (a client can't post by faking a role) — the rules ship separately from the app build.
• UI: ChannelMembersPanel.tsx, AddChannelMembersDialog.tsx (bulk cap 50), and the Who can post select in EditChannelDialog.tsx (admin-only, feature-gated via isUnreleasedFeatureVisibleInRenderer('channel-invitations', settings)). Invariants — no DM members, last-manager protection, single-batch atomic writes — are locked by the contract team-chat-channel-invitations-contract.
• Desktop/PWA render the management UI; the Firestore rules apply uniformly to every client. Setting: channelInvitationsEnabled. Feature id: channel-invitations.

Related

Team Chat itself — channels, messages, and how the workspace is organised — is on the Team Chat page, and the sidebar row that gets you there is described on the Communication group page. If what you are after is messaging a specific agent rather than a person in a channel, that is a different surface, covered on the cross-session messaging page.