We are still working on the official Terms of Service. In the meantime, the following terms apply. By accessing the openkw.org or associated websites, or contributing content to them, you are agreeing to be bound by these terms.
In the following, "you", "user" or "users" means any user(s) of or contributor to these websites. "We", "us", or "the Institute" means OpenKilowatt Institute, a non-profit public interest corporation, incorporated in the state of Delaware, which owns and operates the openkw.org and associated web sites and services. "This site" and "website" mean openkw.org and/or any associated website(s).
In order to serve our public interest mission, the Institute provides two primary sets of services on this site: (a) Educational and Community. We provide free Wikis, Blogs, and Forums where members of the public can share useful information and ideas, help each other, and discuss policy and practical issues. Institute Staff also contribute some content to these media. (b) Collaborative Project workspace. In our Tech Forge area, we provide free workspace for technical contributors to come together, form teams, and establish projects to solve various problems in kilowatt-scale power and storage. Through these services, we provide a means for "good ideas" to be aggregated, shared, grown and brought to fruition. These two sets of services are subject to different Terms of Service (ToS).
Educational and Community services ToS
- Relevant. All content published on this site is supposed to further the purpose of the Institute and the interests of its public. Please make sure your content is related to kilowatt-scale power and storage, green/renewable/sustainable energy, green energy policy and practice, etc. Irrelevant content may be edited or deleted by Institute staff, and repeated submissions of such content by a user may lead to that user being blocked from the site's services.
- Friendly. Most readers of this site share a common interest in solving the world's energy problems in a collegial way. We also want this site to be usable by students, so please keep your contributions family-friendly. You know what that means. If the words crude, obscene, offensive, racist, inflammatory, disgusting, degrading, threatening, inciting, etc., apply to a piece of content, then that content doesn't belong on our site. We reserve the right to delete such content when it is brought to our attention, and block its posters.
- Free. All content posted in the Educational and Community areas of the site are intended to be publicly licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 license (CC:BY-SA).
- Users of the site, please adhere to the terms of this license when you use or share this content. You must attribute the content, and you must grant the same CC:BY-SA license to all recipients.
- Contributors to the site, you may only contribute content to this site if you own the content, or have documented a previously existing CC:BY-SA license to the content, and by contributing your content you irrevocably grant such a license to all members of the public and to the Institute.
- Please don't post any content that violates this rule. It makes us look bad, and it makes you a copyright violator.
- Attribution. Contributors retain ownership to their content, and we attribute their postings on the Institute's Wikis, Blogs, and Forums by posting the contributor's User ID next to each posting. Each individual user may configure their User Profile to control how much public contact information is associated with their User ID.
- Aggregated content. To further its mission, the Institute may re-publish content from many contributors, in aggregated form. In this case, it is likely to be prohibitively difficult to accurately attribute each individual piece of content, while providing editorial uniformity. Therefore, contributors to the site grant the Institute an exception to the "Attribution" clause of the above license. If the Institute re-publishes content from multiple contributors in aggregated form, then it is not required to attribute each piece of content to the individual contributors. Instead, it may make a blanket attribution in the form of a reference to the information being previously published on the website.
- Limitations of License. Note that the above license refers only to the Copyrights in or related to the content on the site. The CC:BY-SA license does not deal with other forms of Intellectual Property rights, such as patents, trade secrets, or trademarks, and no rights in such IP is allowed or disallowed, added or subtracted, by this license. Also, it applies only to content in the publicly accessible Educational and Community portions of the site; the private Project Team areas in the Tech Forge are excluded.
- Publication. With regard to Intellectual Property, contributors should note that posting content to the public areas of the site constitutes "publication" in the legal sense. This may affect the patentability of some new ideas, depending on your jurisdiction. To put it in plain language (and please note we aren't lawyers and this isn't legal advice), if you publish it before applying for a patent on it, you've probably put the idea in the public domain. We think that's a GREAT idea in general, but you might want to read the section on Patent Assistance through the Tech Forge before deciding to do it.
- Evolution. The Institute is still working on these Terms of Service, and will be updating them in the coming weeks. When they change, the changes will apply retroactively to content contributed in the intervening time. We apologize for this necessity, but we've got to listen to our lawyers. However, we commit to retaining the spirit of the above terms.
Collaborative Project workspaces and services ToS
These workspaces are not yet actively available to Project Teams. Their Terms of Service will be published prior to making such services available.
Trademark Notice
OpenKilowatt, OpenKW, and the “Opensource power” taglines are
service marks of OpenKilowatt Institute. All rights in these marks are reserved.
