Opencomm terms of use

Version: 2026-10-05-draft-1 Effective from: [DOM: effective date]

These terms are the agreement between you and [DOM: legal name of the entity that operates Opencomm] ("we", "us") for using Opencomm. Please read them, especially the parts in bold, which limit our responsibility or your rights.

If you only belong to a community, sections 1 to 8 and 10 to 14 are the ones that matter to you. Section 9 is for people who set up and run a community.

1. What Opencomm is

Opencomm is software a community uses to run itself: members and their profiles, notices and polls, events and bookings, statements of account, a shop, forms, discussions, mentoring, sports fixtures, a gate register and incident records.

Each community on Opencomm is run by its own people (for example a school office, a club committee or an estate manager), not by us. They decide who joins, what is recorded and what is said. We provide and look after the software.

2. Who can use it

• You must be [DOM: minimum age for an account; 18 recommended] or older to create an account.
• A child takes part through a parent or carer. A community admin adds the child and links them to a parent or carer, who gives consent and acts for the child. A child cannot sign in.
• You join a community by invitation or with the community's access code. Membership of a community is up to that community.

3. Your account

• You sign in with a Microsoft account through Microsoft Entra External ID. Keep that sign-in secure: anything done while signed in as you is treated as done by you.
• Give accurate details, and keep your name and phone number up to date. A community may rely on your phone number in an emergency.
• Tell us at [DOM: general contact email for Opencomm] if you think someone else has used your account.
• You can erase your account at any time from Your data (see our privacy notice for what erasure does and does not remove).

4. Using Opencomm properly

You must not:

• post anything unlawful, defamatory, threatening, harassing or hateful, or anything that infringes someone else's rights;
• share another person's personal information in a way they would not expect, or that the law does not allow;
• post sexual content of any kind involving a child, or anything that puts a child at risk;
• pretend to be somebody else, or act for a child you are not responsible for;
• try to get into a community, an account or information you are not entitled to, test the security of Opencomm without our written permission, or interfere with how it works;
• use Opencomm to send unsolicited marketing, or scrape or copy it in bulk;
• use an access code or invitation that was not meant for you.

A community may have rules of its own on top of these.

5. What you post

• What you write or upload stays yours.
• You give us, and the community you post in, permission to store, show and send it to the people the community allows to see it, for as long as it is on Opencomm, so the service can work.
• Members can report a post. The community's moderators decide what to do with a report, and may hide content or restrict an account in that community. A community can pass a report on to us.
• Discussion posts and knowledge pages keep an edit history, so moderators can see what was changed. If you erase your account, your posts stay with the byline "A former member".

6. Money

• Opencomm does not handle money. It has no wallet and takes no payments for a community. A community shows its own bank details, and you pay the community directly, using the reference on your statement.
• A community records the charges it raises and the payments it receives. Your statement is worked out from those records. If you disagree with a charge or a payment record, take it up with the community; we cannot change its books.
• Shop orders are collected in person and settle on your account with the community. Refunds are between you and the community.

7. Safety features are not an emergency service

The gate register, incident records, alerts and emergency contacts help a community keep track of people. They are not an emergency service and do not replace calling one. In an emergency, call 10111 (police), 10177 (ambulance) or 112 from a mobile phone. We do not monitor communities and we cannot guarantee that a register is complete or that a notification arrives in time.

8. Privacy

How personal information is handled is set out in our privacy notice, version [DOM: privacy notice version at publication], at [DOM: website address]/privacy-notice. When you accept these terms we record that you were shown that notice and which version it was.

9. If you set up or run a community

This section applies to the person who creates a community (its owner) and to the organisation that person acts for.

9.1 Who is responsible for what

• Your community is the responsible party under POPIA for the personal information of its members, their children and anyone else recorded in it. You decide why and how that information is processed.
• We are your operator. We process that information only on your instructions, as given through the way you use Opencomm, and for no purpose of our own except keeping the service secure and working, and complying with the law.
• [DOM: a separate written operator agreement (POPIA s21) is recommended; see drafting notes. If one is signed, it takes precedence over this section.]

9.2 What we do as your operator

• Keep the information secret and use it only to provide Opencomm (POPIA s20).
• Keep appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational security measures in place (s19), including separating every community's data in the database itself.
• Tell you immediately if we have reason to believe your community's personal information has been accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person (s21(2)).
• Only look inside your community through a support session you can see and end, which lasts 60 minutes, needs a written reason and is logged.
• Use the service providers named in the privacy notice, and tell you before we add one that will receive your community's personal information. [DOM: notice period for a new provider]
• Help you answer a member's request to see, correct or erase their information.

9.3 What you must do

• Have a lawful reason for everything you record, and record only what you need. Do not build forms that ask for health, religious, racial or criminal information, or for identity numbers, unless you have a lawful basis to hold it, and mark such a form as sensitive.
• Get consent from a parent or carer before you record anything beyond what is needed to add a child and ask for that consent. Do not record consent on a parent's behalf.
• Keep incident records factual, and keep details that identify people out of titles.
• Give your members any notice POPIA requires of you as their responsible party. Our privacy notice covers how Opencomm works; it does not cover your own purposes.
• Make sure your bank details are correct. We are not responsible for a payment made to wrong bank details you entered.
• Take responsibility for any integration, webhook, connection or export you set up, and for where that information goes once it leaves Opencomm.
• Appoint people to admin roles carefully: an admin can see members' contact details and incidents.
• Keep the owner role filled. To leave, hand ownership to someone else first.

9.4 Plans and fees

• Opencomm offers plans with different features and member limits, as shown on the Plans page when you choose one.
• Prices: [DOM: plan prices, whether they include VAT, and how fees are invoiced and paid].
• [DOM: what happens when a trial ends or a fee is not paid].
• To change plan, ask us at [DOM: general contact email for Opencomm].

9.5 When a community stops using Opencomm

[DOM: what happens to a community's data when it leaves or is deleted; D-25 recommends a 30-day grace period, during which the owner can export, then deletion]. Before the community closes, its admins can export its records.

10. Changes to Opencomm and to these terms

• We improve Opencomm all the time, and may change or remove features. If a change takes away something a paying community relies on, we will give its owner [DOM: notice period for changes to terms] notice.
• When we change these terms we give them a new version and date. If a change matters, we will ask you to accept the new version the next time you sign in. If you do not accept it, you can stop using Opencomm and erase your account.

11. Suspending or ending your use

• A community can remove you from that community. That ends your access to it, not your Opencomm account.
• We may suspend or close an account or a community that breaks these terms, puts people at risk, or where the law requires it. Where it is safe and lawful to do so, we will tell you why first and give you a chance to respond.
• You can stop using Opencomm at any time and erase your account.

12. Our responsibility to you

• We provide Opencomm with reasonable care and skill. Nothing in these terms takes away a right you have under the Consumer Protection Act or any other law that cannot be excluded.
• We aim to keep Opencomm available but cannot promise it will always be available or free of errors.
• We are not responsible for what communities or members post or record, for decisions a community makes, or for money owed between you and a community.
• Unless the law does not allow it, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability to you is limited to [DOM: liability cap, e.g. the fees paid to us for the community in the 12 months before the claim]. This limit does not apply to loss caused by our gross negligence or wilful misconduct, or to anything else the law does not allow us to limit.

13. The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa. Disputes go to [DOM: governing-law venue, e.g. the court with jurisdiction in Johannesburg]. Before going to court, please contact us so we can try to sort it out.

14. Who we are and how to reach us

As the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act requires: