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Create and Manage Agencies

An agency is the basic organizational unit in Lince. Every project belongs to an agency, and every compute-hour allocation is granted to an agency. This page explains how agencies are structured, how to invite colleagues to help manage one, and how to create new agencies.

The agency hierarchy is recursive

Agencies in Lince are organized as a tree: an agency can have any number of sub-agencies, and each of those sub-agencies can, in turn, have its own sub-agencies, and so on, to as many levels as your organization needs.

This lets a top-level agency (for example, your institution) mirror its internal structure in Lince — one sub-agency per department, per research group, or per any other unit that should manage its own projects and its own share of compute hours.

On the Agency page, this hierarchy is shown as an expandable tree on the left-hand side. Agencies appear with a folder/book icon, and once you select an agency, its own projects appear underneath it in the same tree.

📸 Screenshot: the Agency page, showing the tree with an agency, its sub-agencies, and its projects. docs/images/agency-tree.png — replace this placeholder with a real screenshot from your environment.

Selecting any agency or sub-agency in the tree shows its details on the right: general information, the users (staff) that manage it, its projects, and the resources allocated to it.

Agency staff

Each agency has one or more staff members — users who are allowed to manage that agency. Staff can:

  • Create sub-agencies under the agency they manage.
  • Create projects under the agency.
  • Edit the agency's information.
  • Invite other users as staff of the agency.
  • Distribute the agency's resources among its sub-agencies and projects (see Manage Resources).

Inviting a user as staff

To invite someone as staff of an agency:

  1. Open the Agency page.
  2. In the tree, select the agency (or sub-agency) you want to add the person to.
  3. Open the speed-dial menu (the + button) and choose Add User.
  4. Enter the person's email address and submit.

📸 Screenshot: the "Add User" form with an email field. docs/images/agency-add-user.png — replace this placeholder with a real screenshot from your environment.

If the email matches an existing account, that user is added as staff immediately. If it doesn't, the person appears as invited — they will show up in the agency's user list right away, and will become an active staff member as soon as they create an account with that email.

Creating an agency

You can create a new agency anywhere in the tree you already have staff access to — the agency you select becomes the parent of the new one.

Example: creating a "Informatics Engineering Course" sub-agency under "Computer Science Department"

  1. Open the Agency page and select Computer Science Department in the tree (this will be the parent agency).
  2. Open the speed-dial menu (the + button) and choose Create Agency.
  3. Fill in the form:
    • Name: Informatics Engineering Course
    • Description: a short description of the group.
    • PI: the email of the agency's Principal Investigator.
  4. Click Submit.

📸 Screenshot: the "Create Agency" form filled in with the example above. docs/images/agency-create-form.png — replace this placeholder with a real screenshot from your environment.

The new agency now appears as a child of Computer Science Department in the tree, and it starts with no resources allocated — see Manage Resources for how to give it compute hours.