More efficient organisation comms as WhatsApp Comm...

More efficient organisation comms as WhatsApp Communities rolls out

WhatsApp officially launched Communities which offers larger, more structured discussion groups a few days ago. Roll out is now in effect.

Admins of existing groups have the option to transition their group to Communities, or to re-create their group as a Community from scratch.

Admins also have the power to add members to the groups or they can send out invite links.

Communities are anti-spam as they have one main announcement group which alerts all members of the most important messages.

But members can only chat in small sub-groups the admin has approved.

This means that you no longer need to be bombarded with irrelevant messages or miss out on the important ones.

Communities is especially designed for organizations, clubs, schools, and other private groups better to communicate better and stay organized.

Instead of having multiple WhatsApp groups, communities groups up to 1024 members that can be divided into sub-groups.

For example, Company A with 213 workers probably has a group with all staff members, another for senior managers, a third one for the sales team, three more for their teams in Harare, Bindura, Bulawayo, Masvingo, Mutare and Chinhoyi, another group for branch managers, and the list goes on.

Now Company A just needs one Community, then all the different sub-groups can have their own private chat forums.

As the end to end encryption remains in place, the senior managers can comfortably discuss confidential matters in their sub-group.

The sales team will discuss strategies to meet targets in their sub-group without disrupting everyone else with their updates and jargon.

In their announcement, WhatsApp stressed the encryption aspects of the Communities feature, saying that the company is "aiming to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security not found anywhere else."

WhatsApp Communities are hidden. There will not be a search and discovery feature available - you have to be invited to join.

Phone numbers will be hidden from the wider Community and only made visible to admins and others in the same sub-groups as you.

This is meant to balance users' demand for privacy with the need to allow fellow group members to reach you.

New features that are different from existing WhatsApp groups include, admin controls, support for sub groups and announcement groups, 32-person voice and video calls

Communities also include features that had already found their way to groups like larger file sharing, emoji reactions, and polls.

The launch of Communities could challenge other apps that have grown popular for private and large group communications, including Telegram and Signal, as wl as standard messaging platforms like iMessage, and apps aimed at organizations or schools like GroupMe, Band, Talking Points, Remind, and others.

There are concerns that Communities like this could facilitate groups that engage in illegal or dangerous forums.

WhatsApp's says it will rely on the available unencrypted information about the Community, like its "name, description and user reports" to determine if action is needed.

It says if it finds a group is being used to distribute child sexual abuse material, coordinate violence, or engage in human tracking, it will ban the individual Community members and admins, disband the Community or ban all the Community members, depending on the situation.

However, the company did note that messages that have already been forwarded will only be able to be forwarded to one group at a time, rather than five, the existing forward limit, in an effort to reduce misinformation's spread.

Communities have been in testing with over 50 organizations in 15 countries to gain early feedback. In August, WhatsApp confirmed it had rolled out the feature to a small number of testers but didn't offer a launch date.

Now the feature is in roll out phase to the wider WhatsApp user base, reaching all users worldwide over the next few months on both Android and iOS.