Shared Update groups are as close as you can currently get in ArcGIS Online to being able to collaborate as equals, where everyone in a group would ideally fully share responsibility and privileges. (See Groups Support for "Collaboration of Equals" and Allow Organization and/or Groups to own data in AGOL.)
Unfortunately New member defaults does not support assigning a default role that includes the "Create with update capabilities" privilege. So by default an Administrators is required to create Shared Update groups for users. That sort of manual intervention, however, does not scale well for large organizations.
It is possible, however, to empower users to be able to create their own Shared Update groups using a workaround:
- Create a custom role that includes the "Create with update capabilities" privilege.
- Create an ArcGIS Online Notebook containing code that identifies users with the default role assigned by New member defaults, and changes those users' roles to your custom role.
- Schedule the Notebook to run every 15-minutes
See the ArcGIS Online Notebook, Demo -- Automatically assign custom role with privilege for creating Shared Update groups, for an example of how to implement the above workflow.
If you are interested in having Esri address the inability to directly empower users to create Shared Update group via New member defaults, please consider commenting on and kudoing the Esri Community Idea for: Permit assigning custom role in New member defaults that includes privilege for creating Shared upda....
