An organization is a group of users that owns shared resources together — tenants and schemas. It is the unit of teamwork in Yellow: when more than one person needs to manage the same data structure or workspace, you put them in an organization.

Flat by design

Organizations are flat — there are no sub-organizations or hierarchical groups. A user belongs to one or several organizations, and inside each one is either an owner or a member. That is the whole structure.

Owners and members

Role What they can do
Owner Full control over the organization: add and remove members, define roles, assign roles to members, and manage every tenant and schema the organization owns. Owners do not need any specific role — ownership is implicit permission.
Member Can only do what their assigned roles allow. A new member with no roles cannot see anything until an owner gives them access.

An organization can have several owners. One person can be a member of one organization and an owner of another.

What an organization owns

An organization owns two kinds of resources:

  • Tenants — workspaces of data. The organization decides which tenants exist, who can access them, and how data flows between them (see Tenants).
  • Schemas — the structural definitions of models and properties. Schemas owned by an organization are managed by its owners and can be reused across the tenants the organization owns, or shared with other tenants depending on the schema's access mode (see Schemas).

User-owned tenants and schemas exist too — those belong to a single user and do not involve an organization. Use a user-owned resource for personal experiments; switch to an organization-owned one when more than one person needs to manage it.

Joining an organization

You join an organization when an existing owner adds you as a member. They choose whether you join as an owner or as a regular member, and which roles your membership starts with.

Transferring ownership

A resource owned by a user can be transferred to an organization, and vice versa — provided the person initiating the transfer has the right to do so. This is how a personal project graduates into a team project, or a team project is spun off back to an individual.