Hi @AmberNickell1 - To collaborate on a project using StoryMaps or any ArcGIS product, all participants must have organizational accounts (but the accounts don't have to be in the same organization), and all organizations need to establish a partnered collaboration with any other organizations they want to work with. Partnered collaborations must be established by administrators in both organizations since they allow members of your organization to grant access to content to people outside your organization.
As long as these conditions are met, you can create groups that contain members from different organizations and use them to share content and edit items collaboratively (using shared update groups).
There are several blogs and help topics that can help you learn more, these are a few good ones to start with:
Many organizations already have organizational accounts through Esri's various educational and non-profit programs, so I would encourage you to reach out to the IT or GIS departments that are participating in your project.
Other ways to collaborate
If you are not able to obtain organizational accounts for everyone, collaboration on a story can be done in many other ways!
For example, participants can draft the narrative and plan the layout of maps and media for a story in any other type of shared document participants have access to, and then a subset of participants can have the responsibility of building the StoryMap.
Another way to collaborate is to have various participants work on their own individual stories, and when they are completed the stories can be brought together in a StoryMap collection. For more about creating a collection, see Start your first ArcGIS StoryMaps collection (esri.com). A theme can even be created, shared and applied to all the stories in the collection (and to the collection itself, to unify the appearance of the stories created by different individuals.
Is partnered collaboration right for your project?
While you can use partnered collaboration to grant multiple people permission to edit the same story, it's important to understand that multiple authors cannot edit a story at the same time. Authors are warned when someone else is working on the same story, so as long as authors heed those warnings no one should lose any work or unknowingly overwrite someone else's changes. The collaborative editing of a StoryMap is not yet at the level of the document tools like Word 365 or Google Docs. While we are working toward that, it is a major project and will not be available for some time.
Partnered collaboration can work well in many cases, such as in situations where two or more organizations are working on many projects together. It can also work well for smaller teams or for larger teams that make infrequent edits or who work sequentially on a story (first one person does their work, then the next, and so on) so there is minimal overlap in the time they need to edit the same story.
So depending on how many people/orgs are involved in your project and what their expectations are for what "collaborative editing" means, it may be easier and more effective to use one of the alternative collaboration methods I mentioned above. Otherwise, your team may go through all the effort of involving admins to establish partnered collaborations between all the organizations, setting up all the required groups and permissions, and then be frustrated by having to manage the editing so people work on the story at different times.
Owen Evans
Lead Product Engineer | StoryMaps
