--- title: "Collaborating on a working agreement" description: "Several people can work on the same working agreement in Talkspirit, but not at the same moment: edits go to a shared draft that someone then publishes, and comments carry the discussion." category: structure-governance section: policies-and-publications tags: [permissions] type: Reference lastUpdated: 2026-08-05 locale: en canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/structure-governance/publications-collaborative-edition --- # Collaborating on a working agreement ## Collaborating on a working agreement Several people can work on the same working agreement, but not at the same moment. Talkspirit has no simultaneous editing: there are no live cursors and no shared editing session. What you get instead is one shared draft that anyone with edit access can pick up, and a published version that everyone else keeps reading until the draft is published. You will find these documents in the **Structure** app, under **Working agreements**. The names of the document types are configurable, so your organisation may use a different term than **working agreements**. ## Who can edit a working agreement? Anyone assigned to the circle or the role the document belongs to can edit it, without being invited. So can the person who created it. Administrators keep access to every document in the organisation, whatever its access settings say. To bring in anyone else, open the document and click **Contributors** in the **General** panel. That opens **Manage access**. The row only responds for people who hold **Admin** access on the document, so if clicking it does nothing, you are not one of them. ![The Manage access dialogue for a working agreement: an invite field reading Select members, circles, or roles to invite with an Invite button, a Who has access list showing one person at Admin level, and an Access settings dropdown set to Private](/images/structure-governance/publications-collaborative-edition/01-manage-access.png) - The invite field takes a person, a role or a whole circle, so you can grant access to a team in one go. - Each entry carries a level. **Viewer** reads, **Contributor** reads and edits, **Admin** also publishes and deletes. - **Access settings** controls who else can find the document. **Public** makes it visible to everyone in the organisation. **Private** and **Restricted** both limit it to the owning circle or role and the people you have invited. A new document starts **Private**. ## How do we avoid overwriting each other? The editor saves on its own about two seconds after you stop typing, and again when you leave the page, so there is no Save button to look for. Those saves go to the draft. The version your colleagues are reading only changes when someone clicks **Publish**. Publishing is narrower than editing, and the interface does not warn you. Belonging to the owning circle or role lets you write; publishing needs **Admin** on the document, or having created it. The **Publish** button is offered to everyone who can edit, so if it comes back with "Failed to publish document", that is what happened. Your text is safe in the draft. Ask someone with **Admin** access on the document to publish it. A published document that has unpublished work shows a **Pending draft** chip next to **Edit**. The caret beside it offers **View draft** and **View published**, so you can compare what is live with what is being written. ![A published working agreement open on its full page: the header shows the title, a Published badge, an Edit button with a Pending draft chip and a caret, the General panel lists Belongs to, Contributors and Type, and the Comments tab below it holds one comment](/images/structure-governance/publications-collaborative-edition/02-published-with-pending-draft.png) Because there is no simultaneous editing, the last save wins. If two people click **Edit** at the same time, whoever saves last replaces the other one's paragraphs, with no warning and no merge. Agree who is holding the pen, keep everything else in the comments, and reload the page before you start typing if someone else has been in the document. To throw work in progress away and go back to the published text, open the more menu in the top right and choose **Discard draft changes**. The same menu carries **Version history**, which is where you restore an earlier published version. ## How do I comment and mention people? The **Comments** tab sits in the panel to the right of the document, next to **Activity**. Commenting does not need edit mode: anyone who can edit the document can comment on it, and once it is published anyone who can read it can comment too. ![The Comments panel of a working agreement showing one comment with a reply underneath it, the Hide replies toggle between them, and a Write a comment field at the bottom](/images/structure-governance/publications-collaborative-edition/03-comment-thread.png) - Write in **Write a comment** and send to start a thread. Replies nest under the first comment and collapse behind a toggle that counts them. - Select a passage in the document before you comment to anchor the thread to that text. **Go to text** on the comment jumps back to it, and the more menu can **Hide comment highlights** when the marks get in the way. - Hover a comment for **Reply**, **Resolve** and the more actions menu, which holds **Edit** and **Delete** for your own comments. **Reopen** brings a resolved thread back. - Filter the list by **All**, **Open** or **Resolved** to see what is still outstanding. Type **@** in a comment to mention someone. Mentioning a role notifies everyone holding it, and mentioning a circle notifies every member of that circle, so one mention can reach a whole team. The people you mention get a notification in Talkspirit and an email naming the document. Mentions typed in the document body itself notify nobody: only comments do. ## What changes when the type requires a proposal? A document type can be configured so that changes need the circle's consent. On a type like that, **Edit** does not edit the published document in place. It creates a new draft beside it and takes you there, so the text everyone is reading stays untouched while you work on the replacement. When that draft is ready, the primary button reads **Submit for governance** rather than **Publish**, and it sends the draft to the circle as a proposal. From then on the document is locked: it carries an **Under governance review** banner explaining that edits are held until the proposal is accepted or rejected, with a link to the proposal. The editing controls disappear while the lock is on, so wait for the decision or withdraw the proposal before working on the text again. Types with no proposal requirement publish straight away, with no approval step. Which types need one is set for the whole organisation on the document types page, not per circle. ## What's Next? - [Publications Overview](../structure-governance/publications-overview) - [Using the working agreement editor](../structure-governance/how-to-use-publications-editor-tool) - [Using Publications version history](../structure-governance/publications-version-history) - [How do I manage publication types?](../structure-governance/manage-publications-types)