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Allow a team (circle) to own a board #8167
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@jospoortvliet As I understand, this enhancement can allow the team owner to skip the board(s) transferring step when transferring the team ownership. So, I think we just need to allow a team's owner to own a board instead of a whole team to avoid complex permissions management.
Nowadays we look from a resource perspective and add a team to its permissions.
This vision requires you to think the other way around. You have a team and want to add or remove resources. The team admin/owner roles are perfect for this. You shouldn't restrict it to the owner alone as that is just one person who can be sick, out of office, non-working day, other priorities etc. That is a liability you don't want in a corperate environment.
For the permissions also make sure you have a robust system for nested teams.
When a team properly owns resources you want a rich API so teams can work with the data in the boards from the team view.@JustinDoek The current board sharing functionality already allowed to share board to any user, group or team with flexible permissions (read, edit, manage). Could you please tell me more specifically why existing board ACL system does not work for your use-cases?
I wanted to start with nested teams, but i see those do work now. Never got a reply on my issues about that, but thank you for fixing that.
2 issues with the current ACL system:- When you give a team manage rights on a board you give all the team members manage rights on the board.
- When the owner gets deleted one way or the other. The board is lost. This is a Single Point of Failure.
From a team point of view you want to work with the team roles to have more gradual permissions on resources.
We also want t to control and audit the connected resources from the team 'admin' interface. All resource actions should be fully API'able.So we have 3 types of roles in teams right now:
- owner (only person who can delete the team)
- moderators (can add/remove team members, rename team etc)
- normal members
We want to add 'guests' (read-only members) and probably much more rich roles - including a custom role mechanism so complex permissions ("can manage X but not Y") can be assigned.
Deck doesn't have to expose everything, but the core issue team ownership should resolve is that no single person can block work or cause issues when unavailable or having left the company.
From that perspective, a mapping like this would perhaps suffice initially:
- moderators can act as owner
- normal members can act as normal members
- guests have read-only access (future feature of Circles/Teams. so not for 35)
There will be other permissions - blocking re-sharing of resources is a team-wide setting we want to implement, for example.
My PR was rather simple, making all team members owners. So that won't do ;-)
I updated the issue. Feel free to edit it further of course.
even more simple, for a first version, perhaps this would make things easier:
- allow assigning a team as owner though the API
- under the hood, map it so the team owner is board owner and the board is shared R/W with the team members.
- moved this to 🧭 Planning evaluation (don't pick) in 📝 Productivity team
on Aug 3, 2026 - moved this from 🧭 Planning evaluation (don't pick) to 🏗️ In progress in 📝 Productivity team
on Aug 3, 2026 - linked a pull request that will close this issuefeature: Allow a team (circle) to own a board #8266
on Aug 18, 2026 - moved this from 🏗️ At engineering to 🎉 Done in 🖍 Design team
on Aug 27, 2026 - moved this from 👀 In review to ☑️ Done in 📝 Productivity team
on Aug 27, 2026 - added a parent issue
on Sep 30, 2026
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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
In a organization, people come and go. This can be a problem when they own resources that are actually used/relevant for a larger group of people. For Files, this was resolved via Teamfolders, and Collectives resolved it by always having a circle as owner. Deck should follow the same/a similar approach.
This is part of a wider effort to ensure team ownership is possible for all resources: nextcloud/circles#2644
We have 3 types of roles in teams right now:
We will add 'guests' (read-only members). After that, a rich role mechanism is on the agenda. This would including a custom role mechanism so complex permissions from a checklist ("can manage X") can be assigned for each role, then roles can be assigned to team members. Other settings we are working on is to dis-allow re-sharing on a team level, ideally Deck can respect that setting.
Much of that is future, but for Deck now the core issue team ownership should resolve is that no single person can block work or cause issues when unavailable or having left the company.
Describe the solution you'd like
It should be possible to designate a team as owner.
Based on the roles in teams that currently exist, a mapping like this would perhaps make sense:
There are other questions and I thought of what I think are reasonable answers, but the designers might have different ideas of course:
Describe alternatives you've considered
There could be a no-owner model, like Talk, where boards exist on their own... But I think this makes big orgs, who want tight ownership and clear responsibilities, very unhappy.
Additional context
I did an AI assisted PR earlier - but did not have the time to work on it more:
#7899