Terms of use

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Joining and using GovSpace
3. Data use and privacy
4. Confidential information
5. Maintenance and downtime
6. Do’s and don’ts
7. Payments, renewals, and refunds
8. Termination
9. Liability and indemnity
10. Important housekeeping

Introduction

Welcome to the GovSpace, a collaborative platform and community hosted by Digital Transformation Solutions (DTS)!

We’re excited to have you here but before you start using GovSpace, we need you to look through and accept these terms. We’ve done our best to explain it all without using too much jargon, so it’s clear what we expect from you and what you can expect from us.

To make things easier, we’ve included summary paragraphs at the top of each section to give you a heads up on what’s coming up.

These are your legal rights and obligations, so please read everything. If you can’t agree to our terms, then you can’t use our services.

If you still have questions or comments after you’ve read these terms, please get in touch with us via email support@govspace.io — we’d love to help.

Joining and using GovSpace

In this section we explain how to subscribe to GovSpace and use our service. When you see a word in bold, it will have the same corresponding meaning every time it’s used within these terms.

1. You and GovSpace: when we say you or your, we mean both you and any entity or firm you’re authorised to represent. When we say Digital Transformation Solutions, DTS, GovSpace, Diagnostic and AI Readiness Tool (DART), AI Gymnasium, we, our or us, we’re talking about Digital Transformation Solutions, LLC, a limited liability corporation in the state of New York, USA.
2. Our services: Our services consist of all the services we provide now or in the future, including our online digital tools, such as GovSpace.
3. Creating an organization profile: When you create an organization profile to use our service and accept these terms, you become a GovSpace user.
4. People invited to use GovSpace: A collaborator is a person invited by an existing user of GovSpace. If you’re a collaborator, you must also accept these terms to use our services.
5. User roles and access: As a GovSpace user, inviting others into your organization profile, you should understand the permissions you’re granting to collaborators. GovSpace users have the ability to access and modify the organization profile, digital twin, and various GovSpace activities; invited collaborators have the ability to access and contribute only the portion(s) of the organization in which they’re authorized by the GovSpace user.
6. The right to use our services: Whether you’re a GovSpace user or a collaborator, we grant you the right to use our services for as long as the GovSpace user maintains connection with us and we see it is contributing to our mission to accelerate the creation and adoption of scalable government technology (govtech), supervisory technology (suptech), and, more broadly, public sector solutions and digital transformation initiatives.
7. Your responsibilities: You promise that you’ll keep your information (including a current professional email address) up to date. You’re responsible for providing true, accurate and complete information to get the best user experience. You’re also responsible for protecting your username and password from getting stolen or misused. Our service has minimum password standards but you will ensure that passwords are very strong and not easily guessable. The stronger the password the better!
8. What we own: We own everything we’ve put into our services unless otherwise stated and excluding content owned by others. This includes rights in the design, compilation, and look and feel of our services. It also includes rights in all copyrighted works, trademarks, designs, inventions, and other intellectual property. You agree not to copy, distribute, modify or make derivative works of any of our content or use any of our intellectual property rights in any way not expressly permitted by us.

Data use and privacy

We use your data to provide our services to you. Our privacy policy is an important part of these terms and describes in more detail how we deal with personal data, like your name and email address.

1. Use of data: When you enter or upload your data into our services, we don’t own that data but you grant us a license to use, copy, transmit, store, analyze, and back up all data you submit to us through our services, including personal data of yourself and others, to: enable you to use our services; allow us to improve, develop and protect our services; create new services; communicate with you about your subscription; and send you information we think may be of interest to you based on your communication preferences.
2. Use of your own personal data: We respect your privacy and take data protection seriously. In addition to these terms, our privacy notice sets out in detail how we process your own personal data that you enter into GovSpace, like your name and email address.
3. Anonymized statistical data: When you use our services, we may create anonymised statistical data from your data and usage of our services, including through aggregation. Once anonymised, we may use it for our own purposes, such as to provide and improve our services, to develop new services or product offerings, to identify business trends, and for other uses we communicate to you.
4. Where your data is stored: The data you’ve entered in GovSpace is stored on the Google Cloud Platform, which offers world-class security and data controls. We take steps to minimize the number of authorized persons who have access to the databases on the Google Cloud Platform where your data is stored, and our default policy is to provide access on only an as-needed basis. As such, people who have access to the databases with your data are employees and contracted staff of DTS, technical specialists of academic and research partners and the core set of developers contracted by us and our partners to develop and maintain GovSpace. To reply to your queries and assist you with analyzing your data, we may use Google Workspace, along with DTS digital infrastructure, including corporate email, Microsoft Office and SharePoint facilities provided by Microsoft. Your support queries and personal profile information, such as name, email address and affiliated institution is stored in our HubSpot account.
5. Data breach notifications: If at any point in time we have reason to believe there has been any unauthorized access to personal data that you’ve entered into GovSpace, we’ll let you know and, where possible, give you information about the event, recommended steps you should take, and our mitigation plan. Depending on the nature of the unauthorized access, you may be required to assess whether the unauthorized access must be reported to the contact and/or a relevant authority.

Confidential information

We take reasonable precautions to protect your confidential information and expect that you’ll do the same for ours.

1. Keeping it confidential: While using our services, you may share confidential information with us, and you may become aware of confidential information about us. You and we both agree to take reasonable steps to protect the other party’s confidential information from being accessed by unauthorised individuals. You or we may share each other’s confidential information with legal or regulatory authorities if required to do so.

Maintenance and downtime

We take proactive steps to minimise any downtime, but in rare instances it may be necessary so we can keep our services updated and secure. You also may have occasional access issues or you may accidentally remove data, so our process of backing up your data is important.

1. Availability: We strive to maintain the availability of our services, and provide online support. On occasion, we need to perform maintenance on our services, and this may require a period of downtime. We try to minimize any such downtime. Where planned maintenance is being undertaken, we’ll attempt to notify you in advance but can’t guarantee it.
2. Access issues: As with any service hosted and accessed via the internet, occasionally you might not be able to access our services and your data. This might happen for any number of reasons, at any time. We will do our best to minimize disruption in this regard.
3. Modifications: We frequently release new updates, modifications and enhancements to our services, and in some cases discontinue features. Where this occurs, we’ll endeavour to notify you where practical (for example, by email, on our blog, or within our services when you log in).

Do’s and don’ts

This section is particularly important because it outlines how you can (and can’t) use our services. Much of it will be common sense.

1. Feedback: We deeply value your feedback and may use it without restriction.
2. Help using our services: We provide guidance and support to help you use our services. You agree to use our services only for lawful business purposes and in line with the instructions and guidance we provide.
3. Discussions on GovSpace: We strive to create a welcoming place for professional discussions. These guidelines help ensure that happens across GovSpace.
   • Be respectful in your interactions with other contributors.
   • Only share private information if you’re happy for others to know it.
   • Don’t post anything you don’t have the right to share.
   • We may remove anything we see that jeopardizes our communities.
   • You can help with that. If you see something that doesn’t align with our guidelines below, let us know. Flag any comments, posts, or assets that you think violate our guidelines so our team can review them, or reach out to us on our support page.

   We do not allow any of the following:

   • Personal attacks: This includes name-calling, insults, threats, hurtful comments about someone’s appearance, voice, or style, and all other forms of attacks. We want our community to be welcoming and professional. Personal attacks are the opposite of that. This includes publication of personally identifiable information or doxxing.
   • Discriminatory or derogatory language: This includes racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or other forms of discrimination.
   • Harassment: This includes, but is not limited to, intimidation; stalking; unwanted photography; descriptions of inappropriate physical contact; use of sexual or discriminatory imagery, comments, or jokes; and unwelcome sexual attention.
   • Misinformation and disinformation: Sharing demonstrably false information about news or world events, beyond the scope of reasonable professional discussion or analysis, can be harmful to our community.
   • Illegal activity: Don’t promote, encourage, or make light of any kind of illegal activity.
   • “Not Safe for Work” images and language: This includes language and images that are sexual, violent, or generally offensive in nature.
   • Spam: Spam will be deleted and spammers may be banned, blocked or removed.
   • The “first post” rule: If you break any of these guidelines with your very first post or interaction, it signals that you’re just here to be disruptive. Violators may be banned, blocked, or removed.

   Anyone who does not follow these rules when engaging in our communities will at best be removed from the conversation, and at worst will be banned from the community. These decisions will be made at the discretion of our community managers and DTS personnel, who have the final say on the interpretation of violating our community guidelines and on all decisions resulting in a warning, suspension, and/or ban.

   If you see any of these things happening in our communities, please flag it and it will be reviewed. You can also reach out via our support form.

4. While we can’t cover everything here, we do want to highlight a few more examples of things you must not ever do:
   • Undermine the security or integrity of our computing systems or networks.
   • Use our services in any way that might impair functionality or interfere with other people’s use.
   • Access any system without permission.
   • Introduce or upload anything to our services that includes viruses or other malicious code.
   • Share anything that may be offensive, violates any law, or infringes on the rights of others.
   • Modify, copy, adapt, reproduce, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer or extract the source code of any part of our services.
   • Resell, lease or provide our services in any way not expressly permitted through our services.
   • Repackage, resell, or sublicense any leads or data accessed through our services.
   • Commit fraud or other illegal acts through our services.
   • Act in a manner that is abusive or disrespectful to a DTS employee, partner, or other GovSpace user.

Payments, renewals, and refunds

This section covers how paid subscriptions are billed and renewed, and how refunds work. In short: only auto-renewing plans renew — fixed-term plans just end on their expiry date; payments are non-refundable; and when you change plans the unused value of your current subscription converts to pro-rated credit rather than a cash refund.

1. Fees and payment: Paid subscriptions are billed in advance for each billing period, by card or by invoice, at the prices shown at checkout — a fixed-term plan is billed once, for its whole term. Payments are billed by DTS Solutions LLC. Applicable taxes are determined by your billing country and are shown before you pay and on your invoice.
2. Renewals: Not every plan renews. Which kind you are buying is stated at checkout before you pay, and on your subscription page afterwards. Auto-renewing plans renew automatically at the end of each billing period, on the renewal date shown on your subscription page, unless you turn renewal off before that date. Renewal fees are collected by emailed invoice — we do not automatically charge your payment method. If a renewal invoice is not paid, the subscription simply ends at the close of the period you have already paid for. Fixed-term plans do not renew, automatically or otherwise: access runs for the term you purchased and ends on the expiry date shown on your subscription page, nothing further is billed, and continuing afterwards means buying again.
3. Cancellation: You can turn off renewal on an auto-renewing subscription at any time from your subscription page, or by contacting us at support@govspace.io. Cancelling stops future renewals; you keep access to paid features for the remainder of the period you have paid for. A fixed-term plan has no renewal to cancel — it ends by itself on its expiry date, and you keep access until then.
4. Refunds and credit: Except where required by law or in the case of a billing error, payments are non-refundable. When you change to a different plan, the unused value of your current subscription is applied as pro-rated credit toward the new plan. If you believe you have been billed in error, contact us and we will correct it through a credit note or, at our discretion, a refund.

Termination

1. Termination of services: You can easily terminate your profile by notifying us via email support@govspace.io. If you violate these terms, we may terminate your individual and/or organization profile immediately.
2. Retention of your data: Once your profile is terminated by you or us, it is archived and the data submitted or created by you is no longer available to you. We retain it for a period of time consistent with our data retention policy, during which, as a GovSpace user, you can reactivate your organization profile in accordance with our terms. We retain data in case you need it as part of your record retention obligations, but you can get in touch with us to have your data removed if you wish.

Liability and indemnity

This section is important as it outlines liability terms between us and both GovSpace users and contributors, so we urge you to read it closely and in full.

1. You indemnify us: You indemnify us against all losses, costs (including legal costs), expenses, demands or liability that we incur arising out of, or in connection with, a third-party claim against us relating to your use of our services or any third-party product.
2. Disclaimer of warranties: Our services and all third-party products are made available to you on an “as is” basis.
3. Limitation of liability: Other than liability that we can’t exclude or limit by law, our liability to you in connection with our services or these terms, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited as follows:
   • We have no liability arising from your use of our services for any loss of revenue or profit, loss of goodwill, loss of customers, loss of capital, loss of anticipated savings, legal, tax or accounting compliance issues, damage to reputation, loss in connection with any other contract, or indirect, consequential, incidental, punitive, exemplary or special loss, damage or expense.
   • For loss or corruption of your data, our liability will be limited to taking reasonable steps to try and recover that data from our available backups.

Important housekeeping

Here we set out some additional terms. Take a read as they cover important issues.

1. No professional advice: Just to be clear, while the GovSpace platform may expose you to information we think might be useful in your work regarding suptech, digital transformation, and other relevant topics, this should not be seen as a substitute for professional advice (as opposed to, e.g., commercial Transformation Advisory services from our DTS Services team) and we aren’t liable for your use of the information in that way.
2. Notices: Any notice you send to the DTS team must be sent to support@govspace.io. Any notices we send to you will be sent to the email address(es) you’ve provided us through your subscription.
3. Relationship between the parties; assignment: Nothing in these terms is to be construed as constituting a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship between you and us, or between you and any other GovSpace user or contributor. You’re solely responsible for resolving disputes between you and any other GovSpace user or contributor.
4. Changes to these terms: We sometimes will decide to change these terms of use. But don’t worry, changes won’t apply retrospectively and, if we make changes, we’ll make every effort to let you know. Generally, we endeavor to provide you with 30 days’ notice of material changes before they become effective, unless we need to make immediate changes for reasons we don’t have control over. When we notify you, we’ll do it by email or by posting a visible notice through our services. If a change isn’t material, we may not notify you. If you find a modified term unacceptable, you may terminate your profile by giving the standard advance notice to us.
5. Interpretation: Words like ‘include’ and ‘including’ are not words of limitation and where anything is within our discretion we mean our sole discretion.