Organizations

Organizations are Open Gauge's tenant boundary — every asset belongs to one, and every user can belong to any number of them. Manage them from the Organizations page in the sidebar.

Creating an organization

Any authenticated user other than a Viewer can create an organization from Organizations → New Organization — there's no admin gate beyond that, the same way creating a GitHub or Gogs organization doesn't require being a site admin. The creator automatically becomes that organization's first admin member.

An organization has: name, an optional full legal name, description, website, location (its primary/HQ location, picked from the location tree — see Locations), email, phone, a logo, and a private flag.

Membership and organization roles

A user can be a member of any number of organizations, with a role scoped to that organization alone:

This is a separate concept from the global RBAC role on the user's account (superadmin/admin/technician/viewer — see Authentication). The two don't overlap except for one override: Super Admin can manage any organization regardless of their membership in it, as a system-level safety net (e.g. an organization stuck with zero admins). The global admin role has no special access to an organization it isn't a member of — organization management is otherwise peer-to-peer, same as Gogs. The one exception is Viewer: it's blocked from managing any organization — creating one, editing its profile, uploading a logo, or touching its members — even if it holds a per-org admin role. The global RBAC restriction wins over the org-level one here, the same way Viewer is read-only everywhere else in Open Gauge.

Leaving and removing members

A Join / Leave button appears on every organization's list row and on its detail page — next to Edit for admins, in Edit's place for everyone else. Its label depends on the viewer: "Request to join", a disabled "Request pending" while a request is outstanding, or a red "Leave" for members; each opens a confirmation dialog before doing anything.

A member can leave at any time — unless they're the organization's last remaining admin. In that case the Leave dialog guides them instead of just failing: promote another member to admin first if there are other members, or deactivate the organization instead if they're the only member left. The same last-admin guard applies when an admin tries to remove themselves. Removing (or leaving) doesn't delete the membership record — it's marked inactive, preserving the history of who was ever part of the organization, consistent with Open Gauge's general soft-delete philosophy (see Data model & concepts).

An admin can also add members directly from the organization page's Add member button (visible in edit mode, same as the role-change and remove controls), which opens a searchable, multi-select list of every user who isn't already an active member — selected users are added with the member role.

Visibility

• Public organizations (private: false) show their full profile — name, full name, description, website, location, email, phone — to any authenticated user, whether or not they're a member.
• Private organizations show only their name (with a lock icon) in the Organizations list, so they're still discoverable enough to request joining. Everything else — the profile details, the member roster, and its assets — is visible only to members (and Super Admin).
• The member roster itself is never public, even for a non-private organization — only members can see who else belongs to it.
• An admin can deactivate ("delete") an organization from its edit form's Danger zone, behind a confirmation dialog. A deactivated organization is invisible to everyone except Super Admin — it drops out of the Organizations list and its page 404s for anyone else, the same treatment as a private organization taken to its extreme.
• Super Admin sees deactivated organizations in the Organizations list too (highlighted red, labeled "Deleted") and can reactivate one with the Restore organization button that replaces "Delete organization" in that org's Danger zone once it's deactivated. Restoring only makes the organization active and visible again — it doesn't reactivate any memberships that were cleared on deactivation; re-add members via Add member afterward.

Join requests

A user who isn't a member of an organization can send a join request from that organization's page. This notifies every admin of the organization two ways:

• Email, if SMTP is configured (see Email notifications).
• An in-app notification (the bell icon in the top bar) — always, regardless of whether mail is configured. This is the guaranteed channel; email is a convenience on top of it.

The requester shows up right in the organization's Members list with a "Pending" status — clicking the in-app notification takes an admin straight to the organization page in edit mode so the new request is immediately visible. An admin approves or rejects it from that same row. Approving adds the requester as a member; either decision notifies the requester the same way.

Assets belong to an organization

Every asset has a direct organization_id, chosen from a dropdown of the creating user's own organizations when the asset is created. This is independent of the asset's location — an asset's organization and its location's organization aren't cross-validated, so pick both separately. The organization is shown on the asset's detail page (Overview tab → General panel) and linked back to that organization's page.

An organization's page shows a clickable asset count that links to the asset register, filtered to that organization's assets (/assets?organization_id=...), the same pattern used by a location's asset count (see Locations).