Virtual Organisations

A Virtual Organisation (VO) represents a research community and, in practice, it is just a group of users. VOs are created to organise a community of researchers, who can share resources across the EGI Federation and other services to achieve a common goal, as part of a scientific collaboration.

See the list of Virtual Organisations

Existing VOs can be found in the EGI Operations Portal.

Click on the icon under the “Details” column to access more detailed information of the VO.

How to join a Virtual Organisation

There are different ways to join a VO:

• Contact the administrators of the VO (the VO Managers). They can send you an invitation or a link to apply for membership in a VO.
• Some community services provide a link on their Websites to grant access to their respective VOs.
• Use the enrolment URL that can be found in the detailed information of the specific VO, in the EGI Operations Portal.

Often, your request to apply for VO membership will be evaluated by a VO Manager before you are accepted in the VO.

How to create your own Virtual Organisation

To register a new VO, access the VO registration page of the Operations Portal. You will need to log in via Check-in and fill in the VO ID card, which is the basic information for the VO.

The VO registration process is detailed in the procedure PROC14 VO Registration.

The person registering a VO is considered the administrator of the VO, also known as VO Manager. Additional VO Managers do not need to be included at the time of the VO creation, they can be added later.

Manage a Virtual Organisation

A VO is managed by its VO Managers. VOs can have more than one administrator, and they are responsible for the correct operation of the VO. The functions of the VO Managers include:

• Evaluate membership requests and approve or reject them. This is an important point, since membership in a VO may grant access to data or resources, so normally a VO Manager should not accept members arbitrarily.
• Attend security recommendations, provide information requested by the EGI security teams and maintain the resources and users of the VO secure.
• Provide information about the VO activities for EGI and for VO members (to both people and sites).

VOs can be structured in groups, to organise the different permissions that users have inside a community. For example, inside a VO there can be a group for users that will manage cloud infrastructure, another group for users that access a specific application, other group for users that will attend a workshop and need access to Notebooks, etc.

Check-in offers two tools to organise a community:

• Keycloak.
• Perun.

Follow the links for detailed information on how to manage VO groups.