The Group's Google Workspace
How our email, calendars and files work — for every volunteer — and how to administer them, for whoever holds that job next.
Start here
| You are… | Read |
|---|---|
| A leader or trustee using the system day to day | For volunteers — where mail goes, how to reply, the five rules. Ten minutes, once. |
| The current or incoming administrator | For admins — architecture, design decisions, and scripted runbooks for onboarding, offboarding, role handovers and new sections. |
| Setting up the admin tooling from scratch | GAM setup — install, authorise, domain-wide delegation, and the traps that cost the first admin a day. |
The system in three sentences
Every published address (beavers-gwp@,
treasurer@, info@…) is a Google Group in front of a
shared mailbox, so mail reaches the whole team and a permanent shared
archive at once. Work happens in the shared mailbox — one owner per message,
inbox means open, archive means done. Access to everything (mail, drives,
calendars) follows group membership, so people are added and removed in
exactly one place.
Principles that everything else follows from
- Addresses outlive people. Published addresses are groups; role history lives in role mailboxes; handover is five minutes, not a migration.
- One place to add, one place to remove. Group membership drives all access. Offboarding that misses a step is how organisations leak data.
- Drives are the record, mail is correspondence. No Vault on this edition — anything that must survive lives in a shared drive, never only in a mailbox, never in My Drive.
- No unobserved one-to-ones. All parent and young-person contact goes through section addresses, visible to the whole team — the Yellow Card principle applied to email.
- Everything scripted, everything dry-run first. Routine changes are runbooks in the admin repo, reviewed before they execute, safe to re-run.
Repository: the
scouts/ admin repo holds the
scripts, the full migration plan, and CLAUDE.md (state and hard
rules — also the orientation file if the admin is an LLM). This site is the
readable map; the repo is authoritative.