You might also benefit from reading the Hints for content contributors and the Hints for reviewers help.

Every Mars Society group can have a shared folder

By default, all chapters and all task forces have a shared folder. Members of a chapter (as long as our database knows about it, assuming that your chapter contact has kept our information up to date) automatically get the role of group member within their chapter's folder, and therefore can add content in that folder as they can in their own personal folder.

The same principles as a apply in Hints for content contributors apply to group folders, but the following customizations were made:

• If you create content and put it in the private state, it will be private to the group, not just to you, i.e. all group members (for example, members of your chapter) will be able to view it, but no one else.
• A new content type, Chapters News, has been added, to allow chapters to report chapter related news. This content type behaves exactly as the News Item type, but published chapter news are not listed with the rest of the news, but in their own list here.
• When viewing any group folder (i.e. anywhere inside the groups path), the portlets in the left and right columns have been decluttered a little to make space for future group tools (the photo of the day, shopping mall, external news, books, and external links portlets have been removed)
• Within the groups folder, the news portlet on the right has been replaced by the chapters news portlet.
• There is a poll item for informal polling of members. This is experimental at the moment, and currently, all group members are polled at once (i.e. it is not possible for a group to poll only its members).

Uses

Chapters news can only be put in these folders, so that is one obvious use for them. You can also use these folders to share data privately among your group, including any type of file (i.e., use the File content type). It is currently not possible to make a group web site with a different look than the Mars Society default and without the generic left and right columns, but you could nonetheless set up a Page as the default view of your group folder and set up a neat public view for your group within the Society's site. You will have to submit for publication any content that you want to be visible by all visitors, but the default state, Visible, allows any content you choose to be visible by all paid society members.