title: “Board Portal”

This guide covers the Board Portal module. If your gallery has not switched it on (the Owner does that in Settings → Extensions), this page will not match what you see — skip it for now.

Board Portal

For gallery staff who sit on the board, and for the owner or administrator who keeps it. Agendas, papers, motions, votes, minutes and the actions left over afterwards — in one place, behind one door, instead of in an email thread that half the gallery can read.

This guide is mostly about who can see what. If you read only one section, read Drafts, and who can see one — and read it again if you knew this module before September 2026, because what it says changed.

Switching it on

The Board Portal is opt-in. A gallery does not have it until somebody turns it on.

1. Go to Settings → Extensions.
2. Find Board Portal.
3. Press Enable.

Only the owner or an administrator sees that button. Anyone else looking at the same card reads Ask the owner to enable this extension instead. Until it is on, opening the page gives you a panel headed This feature is turned off, which points back at Settings → Extensions.

There is no extra permission to hand out afterwards. Being allowed in is decided entirely by the Members tab and your gallery role — see below.

Delete data on the same extension card is not the same as Disable. Disabling is reversible and leaves everything where it is. Delete data permanently removes every meeting, agenda item, paper, motion, vote, action and seat this module holds, and the uploaded files with them. The confirmation says so and makes you type DELETE. There is no undo.

Getting in

Once the extension is on, Board appears in the sidebar for everyone on your staff — that entry is not a sign that you have access. Opening it when you do not gives you:

Board access is limited — Only board members (and org admins) can view the board portal. Ask an admin to add you to the board.

Who gets past that screen, exactly:

That list is enforced by the server on every single read, not by hiding buttons. Someone outside it who has the address of the page still gets nothing.

The five tabs

A board member who is not an administrator sees four tabs. Members is not hidden from them out of politeness — they cannot change the roster either.

Meetings

Scheduling one

+ Schedule meeting (administrators only) opens a box titled Schedule meeting:

Press Schedule. Cancel closes without creating anything. The list is ordered by date, latest first, and each row shows the title, the date and a status badge. An empty board reads No meetings / Schedule the first board meeting.

This screen cannot edit a meeting after you create it. There is no button to change the title or the date, to mark a meeting finished, to call one off, or to delete one. The status badge on a meeting you scheduled here will read scheduled for as long as the meeting exists. Everything inside a meeting — agenda, motions, votes, minutes — is fully editable; the meeting’s own details are not. Type the title and the date carefully.

Inside a meeting

Clicking a row opens it. Across the top: the date, the location, the status badge and, when there is one, the Join link. Below that, four sections.

Agenda

+ Item (administrators only) asks for an Agenda item title and adds it to the bottom of the list. Items are numbered in order.

• ↑ and ↓ move an item up or down. The new order is saved as one change — it either all lands or none of it does.
• ✕ deletes an item. There is no confirmation and no undo.

An empty agenda reads No agenda items.

A row can also show a presenter’s name and a length in minutes when those are set, but this screen has no field for either — the prompt asks for a title and nothing more.

Papers on a meeting

This section lists the documents attached to this meeting, each one a link that downloads it. An empty one reads No papers attached.

Be aware of a real limit: uploading on the Papers tab does not attach the document to a meeting, and there is no control anywhere on this screen for attaching one. In practice this section stays empty and the Papers tab is where the board reads its documents. Name your files so people can tell which meeting they belong to — 2026-03 Finance report rather than report(2).pdf.

Motions and decisions

+ Motion (administrators only) asks for a Motion / resolution and records it against the meeting. Each motion shows its title, an outcome badge, and a vote tally as three numbers: for / against / abstain. Empty reads No motions recorded.

Administrators get a votes link on each motion. Opening it shows:

• a row of outcomes — carried, failed, deferred, pending — and picking one sets it. Anything other than pending stamps the motion as decided at that moment. A new motion starts at pending.
• everyone who holds a seat on this board and has a sign-in account, each with their seat title and for, against and abstain. The button matching that person’s current vote is highlighted. A seat held by a gallery member with no account is not in this list — see Seating a member who has no account.

How a vote is recorded, and whether it can be changed. An administrator records votes on behalf of the board — board members do not cast their own here, and a board member who is not an administrator sees only the tally. A vote is one of for, against or abstain; there is no third state and no write-in. Pressing a different button for the same person replaces their vote rather than adding a second one, so a correction is one click and the tally cannot be inflated by pressing twice.

A recorded vote cannot be un-recorded. You can change it from one of the three to another, but there is no way on this screen to take a person back to having no vote at all. If you record a vote against the wrong name, record the right vote for the right person and note the correction in the minutes — the misplaced one will stay in the tally.

Two related cautions:

• The voter list is the board, not the gallery. A vote can only be recorded for somebody who holds a seat here, active or not — a seat that has since been deactivated still counts, because minutes are often written up afterwards.
• Setting the outcome and recording the votes are separate actions. Nothing adds the tally up for you or refuses an outcome that disagrees with it. The outcome badge says what you pressed.

Minutes

The Minutes section carries a badge reading draft or published. Administrators get Edit, which opens a box — Minutes (markdown)… — with three buttons:

• Save draft — saves the text with the badge at draft.
• Publish — saves the text with the badge at published.
• Cancel — closes the editor without saving.

Either save confirms with Minutes saved. Minutes are written in markdown and shown formatted, and run to 50,000 characters. Before anything is written the section reads No minutes yet.

A board member who is not an administrator sees one of three things: the minutes, if they are published; No minutes yet., if nobody has written any; or These minutes are drafted and under review, if they exist but are not published. Administrators always see whatever is in the box, because writing minutes means reading them back.

Drafts, and who can see one

This is the part to get right.

A draft is only visible to administrators. Until September 2026 it was not: the draft badge was a label and nothing more, and everything typed into the minutes box was readable by the whole board from the moment it was saved. That was wrong, and it is fixed.

Pressing Publish is what shows the minutes to the board, and it is the only thing that does. Pressing Save draft on published minutes takes them back out of view again — the badge is not a one-way switch.

Publishing still does not put the minutes on your website, does not email them to anybody, and does not lock them against further editing.

A board member is told a draft exists. They are not shown No minutes yet. for a meeting whose minutes have been written — that would be a different untruth, and it would leave them with nothing to wait for. They see that the minutes are drafted and under review, and that is all they see.

The meeting itself is not hidden. Every active seat can still open it and read its agenda, its papers, its motions and its vote tallies. What is withheld is the unpublished minutes text, and nothing else about the meeting.

What this still means in practice. Your draft is readable by every gallery administrator from the moment you save it, and administrators are not always the same people as the board. If something must not be seen by your administrators, it does not belong in the minutes box at any stage. Draft it somewhere else and paste it in when it is fit to be read.

What the badge is for is unchanged: it tells the board that what they are reading has not been approved yet, so nobody quotes it as the record of the meeting. It is now a wall as well as a label.

Papers

The Papers tab is the board’s document library — every paper in the gallery, newest first, with the date it was added. Empty, it reads No papers / Upload board papers here.

Uploading

+ Upload paper opens your file picker. While it works the button reads Uploading…, and it finishes with Paper uploaded.

Two rules are checked before anything is sent:

• 25MB at most. A larger file is refused with Max 25MB.
• PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PNG or JPG only. Anything else is refused with Use PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PNG or JPG.

The paper is filed under the name of the file you picked, so rename it on your computer first if that name is not what the board should read.

Downloading

Clicking the title of a paper downloads it. Any board member can do this; it is the whole point of the library.

Your sign-in is what proves the right to read the file. The paper is sent to you on the request you made while signed in, with your board seat checked, and there is no link anyone else could use.

This changed in September 2026. Until then the button opened a signed, temporary URL that was itself the credential: anyone given that link could open the paper for about an hour, whether or not they had a login here at all. If you have forwarded a board paper link in the past, it stopped working long ago — but the habit is worth dropping, because the file you downloaded is still a file you can forward. Send people to the Board portal instead.

Deleting

Delete asks Delete ”…”? with the paper’s name in it. Confirming removes both the record and the stored file. It cannot be undone, and a paper deleted here is gone for anybody who had not already downloaded it.

Actions

Follow-ups between meetings. Empty, the tab reads No actions / Track follow-ups between meetings here.

The dropdown at the top filters by status: All (where the tab opens), open, in_progress, done, cancelled. The list is ordered by due date, soonest first, with undated actions at the end.

+ Action (administrators only) opens New action:

• Title — required.
• Assign to — anybody in your gallery, or leave it blank.
• Due date.

Each row shows the title, who it is assigned to, the due date, and a status dropdown.

Who can change an action’s status. An administrator can change any action. A board member who is not an administrator can change only the actions assigned to them — changing somebody else’s fails with Action not found rather than quietly doing nothing. Marking one done stamps when it was completed; moving it back off done clears that stamp.

There is no delete on this screen. An action that should not have existed is better set to cancelled, which is what that status is for.

Member sign-ins

Everyone who gets in. This tab shows which current members and guest artists are using the member portal and which are not, so the board can see who may need a hand getting started. It is the same report Owners and Admins see in Organization Insights → Member sign-ins.

1. Open Board in the sidebar, then the Member sign-ins tab.
2. Pick 30 days, 60 days or 90 days for the period (30 days is the default).
3. Read the % using the portal at the top: how many people signed in within the period, out of the people who can sign in, and how many have their portal login off (they cannot sign in, so they are left out of the percentage and the counts).
4. Read the counts: Signed in in the last 7 days, Signed in in the last 30 days, Not signed in for 30 days or more (or the period you picked) and Never signed in, then the 12-week trend of members and guests who signed in each week.
5. In the list, each current member or guest shows Member or guest, their Last member-portal sign-in, Sign-ins (last 30 days) and a Status: Using the portal, Not signed in for N days, Never signed in or Portal login off. Press a column heading to sort; use Status and Find a name to narrow it.
6. Press Download PDF, Download CSV or Download Excel to save it.

This is about using the portal, not about membership: everyone listed is a current member or guest. Member-portal sign-ins only; staff sign-ins are not counted. Only the gallery’s own members appear. A board seat that has been set inactive no longer opens this tab, and neither do Editors or Viewers who hold no board seat.

Members

Administrators and the owner only. This tab is where board access is granted and taken away, which is why nobody else sees it.

Adding somebody

Pick a person under Add member, type or pick a Seat, and press Add. The Seat box starts empty, showing e.g. Chair. Under it the box says Type any title, or pick a suggestion. Left empty, the seat is “Member”., and a Suggestions: row lists every title you can pick with one click. Leave the box empty and press Add to seat the person as Member. Empty, the tab reads No board members / Add people to the board roster.

The Add member list (Select a person…) is everyone at your gallery who does not already hold a seat, each once, in last-name order (A to Z), with a word in brackets saying what kind of person they are:

Guest and show artists and archived members are not offered. A member whose roster record is linked to one of your staff logins is listed once, as the account, never twice.

Seating a member who has no account

A board member does not need a login. Pick them from the list — they read (member, no account) — and add them like anybody else. The seat is saved, and the roster shows them by name with the note no account - cannot vote in the app.

What that note means:

• They are on the roster, and in the board’s record, like any other seat.
• A vote cannot be recorded for them, because a vote belongs to a login. They are left out of the voter list on each motion.
• They cannot open the Board portal or receive the weekly digest — there is nobody to sign in as or to email.

If that member later gets a login and their artist record is linked to it, the seat becomes theirs in the app straight away: Board access, the digest and votes. There is nothing to re-seat — the seat stays where it is, and the note goes away.

A seat can only ever name somebody at your gallery. Another gallery’s members and users are refused, by the database itself, not only by this screen.

What a seat is

The Seat is your board’s own title for the position — President, Membership Chair, Member at Large, whatever your bylaws call it. Type it, or pick from the Suggestions: row under the box (the box’s own drop-down offers the same list while it is empty): Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary and Member, followed by every title already used on your board. A title is 1 to 60 characters; spaces at either end are dropped, and it is shown exactly as typed. An empty box means Member. A title of only spaces, or one longer than 60 characters, is refused with A seat title needs 1 to 60 characters., shown under the box: Add and save stay greyed out and nothing is saved.

Seats created before September 2026 were one of five fixed words; they now read as Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary and Member.

A seat is a label. It is shown on the roster and in the voter list and nothing more — it does not change what that person can do, see, upload or delete. A Chair and a Member have exactly the same access. What decides whether somebody can do administrative things here is their gallery role, not their seat.

edit seat on a row turns the title into a box with the same hint and the same Suggestions: row. Type any title or click a suggestion and press save, or cancel to leave it as it was. Clearing the box and pressing save makes the seat Member. Their votes, actions and history are untouched.

The order of the roster

The roster is listed by last name, A to Z, ties broken by first name. For a member on your artist roster that is the last name on their artist record; for anybody else it is the last word of their name (so Cher sorts under C). Upper and lower case and accents make no difference to the order (émile Zola sorts with Emile), and names are always shown exactly as entered.

To change the order, use Sort by above the roster: Last name A-Z, Last name Z-A, First name A-Z, First name Z-A, Seat A-Z or Seat Z-A. Seat order uses the title as shown, ties by last name. Your choice is remembered on this device only; it never changes what anybody else sees, and sorting changes only the order: the same people, seats and buttons are shown, and only your own gallery’s board is ever listed.

deactivate and activate

Each row carries the member’s name, their seat, a status badge reading active or inactive, and a link that reads deactivate on an active member and activate on an inactive one.

deactivate takes their access away immediately and completely. They can no longer open the Board portal at all: not the meetings, not the minutes — draft or published — not the papers, not the actions, not the roster. They stop receiving the weekly digest. A deactivated member keeps no read access to anything in this module.

The one exception: if that person is also your gallery’s owner or an administrator, deactivating their seat changes nothing about what they can read. Their access comes from their gallery role, not from the seat. To shut an administrator out of the board you have to change their gallery role in Settings, and that is a much bigger decision.

deactivate does not delete anything. The seat stays on the roster wearing an inactive badge, their votes stay in the tallies, actions assigned to them stay assigned, and activate puts everything back. It is the right choice for a term that has ended, a leave of absence, or anybody you may want back.

remove

remove asks Remove from board? and then deletes the seat outright. Access ends exactly as it does on deactivate — the same complete loss, with the same exception for an owner or administrator.

What is different is the record. The person disappears from the roster altogether; there is nothing left to press activate on, and putting them back means adding them again from scratch. Votes recorded for them, actions assigned to them and papers they uploaded all stay where they are.

Prefer deactivate. It ends access just as firmly, it is reversible, and it leaves the roster telling the truth about who has sat on this board. Use remove for somebody added by mistake.

Messaging the board (artMail / opsMail)

With artMail (opsMail outside galleries) also on, staff who can send it get a Board Members audience in Compose, read from this roster: the whole board, or some seat titles (Chair, Treasurer, or whatever titles your seats use). See artMail: Send to the board.

A seat is included when it is active and today is within its term (term start and term end, if set). A seat reaches its holder through their member record:

• A seat given to a gallery member ((member) or (member, no account) in Add member) is linked to that member record. It receives mail once the member has a member-portal login.
• A seat given to an account ((account)) is linked when that account also has a member record at your gallery. If it has none, compose lists the seat under Not sent to as no member record. To link it, add the person on the Artists page as a member with a member-portal login on the same account, or remove the seat here and add it again choosing their member record.

Deactivating a seat, or a term ending, takes the seat off the Board Members audience straight away. Nothing about the Board Members audience changes this roster.

The weekly digest

Once a week, on a Monday, every active board member is emailed a short digest in your gallery’s name:

• the next scheduled meeting — its title, its date and its join link, or a line saying there is no upcoming meeting;
• their own open and in-progress actions, with anything past its due date marked (overdue);
• decisions from the last seven days — each motion that reached an outcome, with that outcome.

Deactivated and removed members are not sent it. Nobody outside the board is sent it. Minutes are never in it, draft or published, and neither are papers.

There is no setting for this. It goes out for any gallery with the Board Portal on and at least one active seat.

When it goes wrong

Somebody on the board says the Board page will not let them in. Open Members. Either they have no seat, or their badge reads inactive — press activate. If the row is missing entirely, add them. If the row reads no account - cannot vote in the app, they have no login yet: give them one and link it to their artist record, and the seat opens for them with no re-seating. If they are not in the Add member list at all, they are neither on your staff list nor a member on your artist roster.

Somebody who is not on the board can read the minutes. Check their gallery role in Settings. Every owner and administrator can read everything in this module whether or not they hold a seat, and taking their seat away will not change that. That is by design; the roster is not the only door.

I saved a draft and now people have read it. Since September 2026 a draft is not readable by the board — only by your gallery owner and administrators, who can read everything in this module anyway. If it was seen before then, that was the old behavior, and what was seen has been seen: edit the text and save again, but say so rather than assume otherwise. See Drafts, and who can see one.

Pressing Publish did not seem to do anything. It showed the minutes to the board, which is the whole of what it does and does not look like much from an administrator’s screen — you could already read them, so nothing on yours changes. It does not send, post or share them anywhere. To see what a board member sees, ask one.

I need to change a meeting’s date, or cancel one. This screen cannot. Schedule the replacement, put a line in the old meeting’s minutes saying where it went, and tell the board — the digest only ever names the next meeting, so an abandoned one will keep appearing in the list.

I uploaded a paper but the meeting still says “No papers attached”. Expected. Uploading on the Papers tab does not attach a document to a meeting, and nothing on this screen does. The paper is safe and downloadable on the Papers tab; point the board there.

A paper will not upload. Two rules, and the message says which one you hit: over 25MB, or not one of PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, PNG or JPG. A scanned PDF is usually the size problem — re-scan it in black and white or at a lower resolution.

Somebody outside the board opened a paper. Ask how they got to it. The download link is temporary but it is also the credential — forwarded to anybody, it opens the file for about an hour without any sign-in. Delete and re-upload the paper if the link has been circulated; that invalidates what was forwarded.

A vote is recorded against the wrong person. Record the correct vote for the correct person, and write the correction into the minutes. The mistaken vote can be changed to any of the three, but it cannot be erased, so the minutes are where the record gets put straight.

The tally does not agree with the outcome badge. Nothing reconciles them — the outcome is whatever an administrator pressed. Re-press the right one.

A board member cannot tick off their action. They can only change actions assigned to them; anything else answers Action not found. Open Actions, check the assignee, and reassign it if it is wrong.

I want to change somebody’s seat title. Press edit seat on their row, change the title and press save. Nothing they have done is lost.

The Seat box only offers “Member”. That was the box starting with Member already typed in, which made the drop-down show only titles matching it. The box now starts empty and the Suggestions: row under it lists every title. Any title can be typed.

Somebody left the board weeks ago and is still getting the digest. Their seat is still active. Open Members and press deactivate.

I turned the extension off and want the data gone as well. Those are two different buttons. Disable leaves everything intact and is reversible. Delete data on the extension card destroys every meeting, paper, motion, vote, action and seat permanently, and makes you type DELETE first.

Related

• Gallery dashboard — where the rest of the gallery’s day lives