sharing only part of a base with editors

[amg]

Hello! I'm new to Airtable, so I apologize if this is a very basic question.

I have a bunch of different contractors. I'd like to use Airtable for each of them to record their progress on the various projects that I assign them. However, I don't want them to have access to each other's records, and ideally they wouldn't even know who each other are. I'd be grateful for any suggestions on how to set this up.

My first thought was to create a single workspace with multiple bases, and then invite each contractor as a collaborator (with editor permissions) on one specific base. Each contractor's base would just contain a subset of my master "projects" base, filtered according to a "contractor" field -- and perhaps with certain other fields omitted, such as my own private notes on their performance.

But I'm guessing that then each contractor would still be able to see who all the collaborators are in the workspace? If so, I'm thinking that I might actually want to create separate workspaces -- a master workspace, and then an additional workspace for each contractor -- and then sync the latter from the former as described above.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

[kuovonne]

If you invite each contractor to only his own base, and do not add any contractors at the workspace level, contractors will be able to see only their own bases. However, that will cause your projects to be split across multiple bases. You could use synced tables to consolidate the projects or split them apart, but you will still have issues with projects being editable in only the source.

Another option is to use only one base but provide only interface access to your individual contractors. That way contractors will have access to only the data you want them to see while also keeping your data in a centralized location.

[amg]

Thank you for the helpful comments! So it sounds like both of my ideas do not work? (This seems to be further corroborated by this thread.) Assuming so, do you have any other suggestions? I do certainly want my contractors to be able to make edits, e.g. marking projects as "in progress" or "complete".

[amg]

Hmm, it seems that maybe I can set up an automation that would do this? Whenever a record in my "master" base is updated or modified and its "contractor" field matches Contractor XYZ, then I could add a corresponding record to my "Contractor XYZ" base (to which Contractor XYZ has access). And likewise, I could set up an automation so that whenever they update a record in that base (or perhaps just whenever they update its "status" field), I could copy the data back over to my original base.

I must say, though: if this solution does work at all, it feels quite inefficient -- and contrary to the "single source of truth" paradigm.