Make ArcGIS Online Profiles Public by Default
Real-world Problem: In disaster response, interagency collaboration is critical. Being able to share data across political and jurisdictional boundaries is one of the greatest challenges to situational awareness. GIS Specialist and emergency managers, now more than ever, want to share and receive access to data from outside their organization.
Technical Problem: Interorganizational Groups makes it possible to share between ArcGIS Online organizations by inviting individuals from one organization to another. This has been around for a while and is actually well documented now, although I still run into users all the time that do not know this capability exists.
Sharing content privately between organizations
Sharing and Collaboration across ArcGIS Online Organizations
The big challenge, however, is ArcGIS Online username profiles need to be set to "Everyone" in order to invite someone into your Interorganizational Group, but profiles are set to Organization by default. This means I have to send a note with instructions to everyone involved in inter-organizational sharing, including people who have never used ArcGIS Online before. This presents a major barrier to entry for collaboration.
Manage profile—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS
Solution: Set profiles to be viewable by "Everyone" by default or at least allow an administrator to do this for the entire organization. This poses no genuine security risk to the organization and could be overridden by an administrator at any time.
I understand there are more programmatic ways of collaboration coming (distributed collaboration, etc), but we need a fix for this in the shorter-term.
Thank you for your time and consideration!