Keeping access right in large professional networks

In a network of organisations, access depends on facts that change all the time: who works for which member, which members hold which status, who has moved on. Moritz Arendt, Head of Product, showed at the Open Social Summit '26 how Open Social is making that manageable at scale.

The problem in practice

IATA's platform has more than 11.000 users who manage airlines and ground handling providers. Each needs the right access, and keeping that accurate today takes daily manual work from the community team. Most networks face a version of the same task: verifying new members, adding them to the right groups, sending the right onboarding, and removing access when someone leaves.

Groups and roles, the usual tools, are static. A person stays in a group until someone removes them. That works for a small committee, but not for thousands of members where the rule is "everyone at a member airline" or "everyone who joined this month".

Segments: audiences defined by rules

Segments define an audience by rules instead of by hand: membership of an organisation, a profile field, a role, or activity. When the underlying facts change, the segment updates. The rules live in the Community Management System, where permissions already live, so they are not duplicated in the email tool, analytics or AI.

We are building segments as a framework that can be extended, not as a single use case, and we plan to contribute it to the wider Drupal ecosystem. IATA and the European Commission are both supporting the development.

A planned example

In the planned IATA setup, airlines verify their own administrators, who then manage access for colleagues. A segment automatically includes every administrator of an airline with an IATA membership. Segments syncs to Engagement Studio, which runs onboarding: a welcome explaining an administrator's responsibilities, and a reminder if the airline profile is incomplete. When an airline appoints a new administrator, they receive the same onboarding without manual work.

Reaching people where they work

Email is not always the best channel. At the Summit, Erik Ballhausen of the European Commission's EACEA noted that many users of the European School Education Platform, including teachers and young people, rarely rely on email. Targeted banners and messages inside the platform, driven by the same segments, are in development, so a prompt such as "complete your airline profile" appears when someone is there to act on it.

What is available

Segment sync to Engagement Studio, topic and event APIs through Connection Hub, user API extensions and webhooks are available today. Segments as a visibility option and targeted banners are in progress. The direction is a loop: define the audience, connect the content, invite people to act, and let their actions update the audience. Community managers spend less time maintaining records and more time on the network itself.

See it for yourself

If you run a network of organisations and want to see how this works in practice, request a demo.