CosmoQuest Terms of Service

This is a community, and as part of our Terms of Service we ask you to agree to the ideals in the Charter below. In additional to these ideals, we also have a few standard terms of service: We promise to never sell your data, share your email address, or otherwise betray your privacy. In using this site, you agree that everything you do can be used for research (you will always be given credit for your discoveries, but you are agreeing to let us make sure they get published.)

CosmoQuest Charter

We, the community members of CosmoQuest, seek to expand our scientific understanding of the universe. In order to build a healthy and productive community, we ask all community members – citizen scientists, professional scientists, programmers, communicators, educators – to agree to a set of basic tenets:

We, the Citizen Scientists of CosmoQuest, agree to

  • always strive to understand the tasks we are doing completely
  • let all of our activities on the CosmoQuest website be used for research
  • give accurate and thorough responses to each task put before us
  • ask questions
  • suggest ways to improve the site
  • learn from others when we can and help mentor others when we can

We, the scientists of CosmoQuest, agree to

  • never ask people to do things that computers could do
  • always explain to the community what science questions we are studying
  • answer questions
  • suggest ways to improve the site
  • provide users timely feedback on the accuracy of their work
  • give community members credit by name for their discoveries
  • publish results in a timely manner
  • share through blog posts all research results

We, the educators and communicators of CosmoQuest, agree to

  • find and implement the best ways to help people learn
  • create programs so that teachers can effectively use CosmoQuest
  • answer questions
  • suggest ways to improve the site
  • communicate opportunities to community members
  • constantly make sure that people are up to date on what is going on in CosmoQuest

We, the programmers of CosmoQuest, agree to

  • write software that
    • is secure and allows users to easily maintain their privacy
    • runs as universally as possible
    • can be translated into multiple languages
    • has gone through usability testing with everyday people
    • has sufficient tutorials and documentation so that everyone can use the software easily
  • respond quickly to bug reports
  • listen to user requests and implement those that we can
  • constantly strive to make the site better

As community members of CosmoQuest, we agree to work together with integrity and mutual respect. We are each, together, still learning and provide different resources to offer this community as we all strive to improve our understanding of the universe. Through our combined efforts, we can and will accomplish great things.

As part of CosmoQuest, we each agree to abide by the above ideals and work to make CosmoQuest an open community that successfully produces new scientific discoveries.