Terms of Service

These Terms govern your use of BGI Commons at bgicommons.org. By creating an account, joining a team or taking part in a HyperSprint, you agree with them. If you do not agree, please do not use the platform.

1. Who you are contracting with

BGI Commons is operated by:

SingularityNET Foundation
Baarerstrasse 141, 6300 Zug, Switzerland
Swiss enterprise identification number (UID): CHE-358.649.107
A foundation (Stiftung) under Swiss law
Contact: info@bgicommons.org

In these Terms, “we”, “us” and “BGI Commons” mean the Foundation; “you” means you as a member.

2. Who can join

You must be 18 or older to create an account and to take part in a hackathon. By registering you confirm that you are.

You must also be legally permitted to use the platform where you live, and not be a person or in a place subject to sanctions that would prohibit us from providing it (section 14).

3. Your account

Give accurate information when you register, and keep it current. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Tell us promptly at info@bgicommons.org if you think someone else has accessed it.

You may sign in with an email and password, or through Google or GitHub. If you use one of those, that provider’s terms apply to the sign-in, and we receive basic account information from them as described in our Privacy Policy.

One account per person. Do not share your account or let anyone else use it.

4. The BGI Commons Constitution

During onboarding we invite you to read and sign the BGI Commons Constitution. It sets out the values this community aims to build by, and signing it is something we hope you mean.

The Constitution is a voluntary community pledge. It is not a contract, and it creates no legal rights or obligations for you or for us. Your binding agreement with us is these Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the rules of any HyperSprint you enter.

5. Your profile and what is public

Your display name is public, and reputation attaches to it. Team names, project titles and descriptions, submissions, and the names of winning teams and their members appear publicly on sprint pages and stay there as a record of that sprint, including after you close your account.

Do not put anything in your profile or submissions that you would not want published, that belongs to someone else, or that reveals sensitive personal information about you or anyone else.

6. Code of conduct

BGI Commons is a working community. When you use it, you agree not to:

• break any applicable law, or infringe anyone’s intellectual property, privacy or other rights;
• post content that is harassing, hateful, threatening, defamatory, deceptive, sexually explicit, or that promotes violence or self-harm;
• impersonate anyone, misrepresent your identity or affiliation, or submit someone else’s work as your own;
• spam the platform or its community channels, or use them to advertise, recruit or solicit without our agreement;
• upload malware, or attempt to disrupt, probe, scrape at scale, reverse-engineer or gain unauthorised access to the platform, its infrastructure or other members’ accounts;
• use the platform to develop or deploy anything designed to cause serious harm, or for any purpose prohibited by export-control or sanctions law;
• interfere with judging, collude to distort results, or manipulate metrics, votes or reputation.

7. Moderation and enforcement

If content or conduct breaches these Terms, we may remove or restrict the content, issue a warning, suspend or close the account, or exclude a member or team from a HyperSprint. We will act proportionately, and where practical we will tell you what happened and why.

If you think we got it wrong, write to info@bgicommons.org within 30 days. You can report content or behaviour to the same address.

8. Hackathons and HyperSprints

Sprint rules. Each hackathon has its own rules (eligibility, team size, tracks, submission requirements, judging criteria and deadlines) published on that sprint’s page. Those rules form part of these Terms while you take part. If a sprint rule conflicts with these Terms on something specific to that sprint, the sprint rule applies; on everything else, these Terms apply.

Teams. You may create or join a team as each sprint allows. Team captains manage membership and submissions for the team. Sort out between yourselves, before you start, who contributes what and how any reward is shared.

Submissions. You are responsible for what your team submits: that you have the rights to it, that it does not infringe on anyone else’s, and that it meets the sprint’s requirements and deadlines. Late or incomplete submissions may be excluded.

Judging. Mentors and judges give feedback and assess submissions against the published criteria. Judging involves subjective assessment and is done at the organisers’ reasonable discretion. Decisions on the merits are final. We may disqualify a submission that breaches these Terms or the sprint rules.

Mentors and judges take part voluntarily. Their feedback is their own view, not advice from us, and we do not guarantee availability, response times or any particular level of support.

We may change or cancel a sprint at our own discretion. If we do, we will tell participants as early as we can.

9. Intellectual property

Your content stays yours. You keep ownership of your profile, your contributions and your submissions.

The licence you give us. So that we can run and promote the platform and the sprints, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for formatting and display, publish, distribute and publicly display your content in connection with operating BGI Commons and promoting it and the sprint you took part in (including in write-ups, recordings, social posts and showcase pages). This licence lasts as long as we display that content, and it survives the closure of your account for content already published as part of a sprint record. It does not let us sell your work or licence it onward for someone else’s independent commercial use.

Open source. A sprint may require submissions to carry an open-source licence, as stated in its rules. Where it does, you agree to release the submitted work under that licence.

Third-party material. If your submission includes code, models, data or media created by others, you must have the right to use and to sublicense it on those terms, and you must credit it as its licence requires.

Our material. The platform itself, the BGI Commons name and logo, and the SingularityNET marks belong to us or our licensors. These Terms do not give you the right to use them.

Feedback. If you send us suggestions about the platform, we may use them freely and without obligation to you.

10. Rewards, prizes and recognition

Discretionary. Rewards and recognition are awarded at the organisers’ reasonable discretion, following each sprint’s published criteria. Taking part gives you no entitlement to a reward, and we may change or withdraw a reward before it is awarded where there is a good reason to.

Checks before any payment. Where a reward has monetary value (in currency, tokens or any other transferable asset) we may require, before paying it:

• verification of your identity and address, using documents we specify;
• information about you and, where relevant, your team;
• screening against sanctions and politically-exposed-person lists;
• any further information we reasonably need to meet obligations under Swiss anti-money-laundering (AML) law or comparable rules elsewhere.

We may withhold, delay, reduce or cancel a reward if these checks are not completed within a reasonable time, if the information given is inaccurate or incomplete, if you are subject to sanctions or located in a sanctioned jurisdiction, or if making the payment would or might breach any applicable law. No interest is payable on a reward that is delayed or withheld, and we are not obliged to explain a decision where doing so would itself breach the law.

Teams. Where a reward goes to a team, we may pay it to the team captain or split it as the sprint rules say. How the team divides it among its members is the team’s own affair.

Tax. Any tax, duty or social-security charge arising on a reward is yours to declare and pay.

11. Community channels and third-party services

We link to and run community spaces on Telegram, Discord and Mattermost, and the platform connects to GitHub, Google and other services. Those are operated by other companies under their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for them, for their availability, or for what other people post there. Their rules apply to you in addition to these Terms when you use them.

12. Compute and technical resources

Where we give you access to compute or infrastructure you may use it only for the purpose it was given to you, in line with these Terms and any specific conditions attached to it. Do not resell it, share your access, mine cryptocurrency with it, or run workloads that are unlawful, that breach export-control or sanctions law, or that are designed to cause serious harm. Access is provided as available, may be limited or withdrawn, and comes with no guarantee of capacity, uptime or data durability. Keep your own copies of anything you care about.

13. AI outputs and educational material

The platform hosts educational material, tools and agents that are built with or run on AI systems. Their output can be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date. It is not professional, legal, financial or safety advice, and you should verify anything you rely on. You remain responsible for what you build and for how you use what you learn here.

14. Export control and sanctions

You may not use the platform, or receive anything from us, in breach of Swiss, EU, UK or US export-control or sanctions law. You confirm that you are not a person subject to those measures and that you are not located in a country or region subject to comprehensive sanctions.

15. Reporting infringement

If you believe content on BGI Commons infringes your intellectual property, email info@bgicommons.org with: what you own and how you own it, where the content is (a URL), why you say it infringes, your contact details, and a statement that your complaint is made in good faith and is accurate. We will look into it and, where a complaint is well founded, remove or restrict the content and inform whoever posted it. Anyone whose content is removed can respond to the same address.

16. Availability

We want the platform to work, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, suspend or discontinue features, or the platform as a whole, and we will give reasonable notice where we sensibly can. The platform is provided as is and as available.

17. Disclaimers and liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations that are not expressly set out in these Terms, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We are not liable for content posted by other members, for anything mentors, judges or other participants do or fail to do, for third-party services and community platforms, or for loss of data, profit, revenue, opportunity, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for any indirect or consequential loss.

18. Your responsibility to us

You will compensate us for losses, liabilities and reasonable costs we incur because you broke these Terms, infringed someone else’s rights, or misused the platform.

19. Ending your membership

You can close your account at any time from your account settings, or by emailing info@bgicommons.org.

We may suspend or close your account if you breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the platform. Where we close an account for a reason other than a serious breach, we will give reasonable notice.

When your account closes, your access ends and your personal data is handled as set out in the Privacy Policy. Sprint records, published submissions and the licence in section 9 for content already published survive. Sections 9, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20 and 21 survive termination.

20. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as the platform develops. We will update the date at the top, and where a change materially affects your rights we will tell you by email or a notice on the platform before it takes effect. If you keep using BGI Commons after that, you accept the updated Terms; if you do not accept them, please close your account.

21. Law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or your use of the platform, are governed by Swiss law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

The courts of Zug, Switzerland have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of your country of residence, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

22. General

These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and any applicable sprint rules, are the whole agreement between us about the platform. If a provision is found invalid, the rest stays in force and the invalid part is replaced by one that comes closest to its purpose. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we do not lose it. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms; we may transfer ours to a successor to the platform, without reducing your rights. Neither of us is liable for failures caused by events outside our reasonable control. These Terms are written in English; any translation is for convenience and the English version governs.