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Collaborating with other users on documents

Owned by Matt Lynch
Last updated: 25 Mar 2024 by Estelle Holmes (Deactivated)
3 min read

Lawmaker is a shared service than enables users to work on projects and documents with other users. However, because it is used across different organisations and jurisdictions, it needs to carefully manage who can see and edit projects and documents within Lawmaker.

This page explains the basics of how user permissions are managed in Lawmaker and sets out some scenarios for how you might use Lawmaker’s features to collaborate with others.

Organisations and users

In Lawmaker, each user is assigned to an organisation (and only one).

Organisations within Lawmaker are configured by the Lawmaker Service Team and their suppliers and generally match real-life organisations. So, for example, there is an organisation in Lawmaker for the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel and there is one for HMRC. When a new user group joins Lawmaker, the Service Team work with the organisations concerned to establish the most appropriate organisational structure within Lawmaker. The organisation setup can be modified over time as well, e.g. to reflect changes in government.

Why are organisations important?

In Lawmaker, when you create a project or a document in that project, by default all users in the same organisation as you can see and edit that document. Users in other organisations will not be able to edit those documents and won’t even be aware they exist. So the organisation setting is crucial for ensuring

(You can lock down permissions to specific named users within an organisation but you can’t extend permissions to edit beyond your organisation - see Managing document permissions.)

Collaborating on documents within the same organisation

TBC

Collaborating on documents between organisations

In the UK, a Lawmaker Document can be a mixture of Policies originating from a number of different Government departments. As far as Lawmaker is concerned, this section is not so relevant to legislation in Scotland, as their permissions are setup differently and can access the same project within the same organisation, as described above.

When different organisations have created their part of the document, they will then need to Share the document with the organisation responsible for laying - Sharing a document with another organisation. Once this is done, they can no longer directly contribute to the editing of the ‘master’ document. [should we give an instruction to then delete these documents?]

For SIs, all organisation contributing should use the same document sub-type (regulation, order) and procedures (made or draft negative) when they create the initial draft. There is a known bug if the procedure is changed… [work around, copy/paste?]

The Laying organisation, can either create a new project or use one of shared Projects to start centralising the documents in one place. Duplicate each of the versions that has been shared with the Laying organisation by using the Copying a document to another project feature.

Copy each shared version to the same folder. For each version use a naming convention that makes it’s clear where the policy as come from, eg: Defra Reg final version or the order you want to ‘stitch’ them together

Create a New working version, call it something like ‘Master version 1’ and open it in the Editor.

Use the copy provision feature to ‘pull' each version of the Policy document into the ‘Master’ version, roughly in the order they should appear. Lawmaker will add each provision to end of the document, regardless of the numbering.

Finally, open the ‘Master’ document and re-order, edit the SI as normal.

Some example scenarios

SI drafter is based in one organisation, submitter in another

tbc - set out SI hub example

Drafter is doing “agency” work on behalf of another organisation

tbc - set out version of DCMS example

SI/SSI requires to be vetted by OPC or PCO before being published