credentials [PCAT Online Help]

- Establish credentials and control who can view them
  - Credentials can be self-asserted or hard wired
  - Most Frequently Asked Questions

Establish credentials and control who can view them

PCAT allows users to establish credentials that make it easier to find and utilize peers via the Peer Directory. To set your credentials, select Update Account Information on the Account drop-down list.

The first tab is for entering your personal information. A key feature on this page is Peer visibility. This control allows the user to determine the extent to which different credentials are visible to other users of the PCAT system. Setting your peer visibility is important as it allows who can search for you and how much of your personal information others can see. For each available field in your user account, you can toggle the peer visibility setting by clicking on the small button to the left of the field.

Green means everyone can see that field
Yellow indicates that only your peers can see that information
Red allows no one at all to see it

Credentials can be self-asserted or hard wired

Most credentials are optional and self-ascribed, such as your degree level, specialization and political ideology. Some credentials are required and necessarily have a hard-wired status. For example, we require a valid email address and assume a .gov email address represents a distinctive government personnel credential whereas a .edu email addresses indicates a distinctive academic status. Affiliations are also credentials that you can back-up with links to your organization or institution Web pages. A government official can provide the url of their agency or sub-agency. An academic can link to their department home page. Anyone can put a link to their home page, which is a very useful credential for collaboration on the Internet. Credentials are the basis for forming peer networks and project groups, as well as for distributing the analytic work to many users and filtering the results.

Most Frequently Asked Questions

Why would I use this system? | Where do I get FDMS bulk downloads? | Does PCAT identify duplicates? | What is QDAP?

© 2009 - 2010 Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), in the University Center for Social and Urban Research, at the University of Pittsburgh, and QDAP-UMass, in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As of 2010, PCAT and this PCAT Help Wiki are maintained and improved by personnel from Texifter, LLC, which is a software start-up located in North Amherst & Springfield, MA and online at http://texifter.com.

Content on this website was made possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation: III-0705566 “Collaborative Research III-COR: From a Pile of Documents to a Collection of Information: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Text Analysis” and IIS-0429293 “Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking.” We are also grateful for financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.