IGuKS: Permissions for a Network of Organisations and Locations
A platform for sign-supported language education whose hardest part is not the content but the question of who may edit which facility.
Services Used
The situation
IGuKS is a platform for sign-supported communication and language education. Professionals, nurseries, therapists and families work with the same signs but each need something different: a register of facilities, a materials library, a video dictionary, a place for professional exchange.
The solution
What emerged is an application with thirty data models, seventy-six pages and eighty-eight interfaces. The video dictionary is not a filing system but a graph: signs relate to each other as synonym, opposite, related, or in sequence. Material packages are not zipped on every request but prepared in the background every fifteen minutes. Memberships run through Stripe and are closed automatically overnight, with a notification going out beforehand.
The hardest part is authorisation. A facility can have several people attached, and an umbrella organisation can run locations. I built the rules deliberately asymmetric: whoever is attached to an umbrella organisation as owner may administer its locations, an editor at that level explicitly may not. Widening rights is easy, taking them back is not. Walking up the hierarchy has a depth limit, so a faulty parent reference ends the request instead of leaving it hanging. Whether someone may create a new facility is checked against the database rather than the session, because the token carries the membership for a few minutes and that is too stale for a paid feature.
The result
Professionals, facilities and families work in one place with the same content, and who may edit which facility follows a rule rather than an exception. Bosnar GmbH holds a 50 percent stake in IGuKS UG. My responsibility here is not only the build but also that the platform sustains itself.