Terms of service

NationWorks is operated by a sole proprietor based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It is not yet incorporated; when it is, the registered name and mailing address will be published here.

These terms apply to anyone who uses nationworks.ca: a visitor reading a public page, a person with a free account, and an organization running its office on the service. Where a term applies to only one of those, it says so.

Three things, and it is worth being clear which is which.

• Public pages, free and open to anyone. Crisis and support lines, a directory of Indigenous services, a jobs board, and each Nation's own website. No account, no charge, no conditions beyond ordinary lawful use.
• A free account, which adds the federal public record: funding history, open programs, procurement, lobbying registrations, officials and treaties, compiled from published government data.
• An organization workspace, which is the software a band office runs on. Getting one is not self-serve: you ask, and a person reads the request. We do this so that nobody puts a Nation's name and records into this system without a human being having looked.

The service is early. Modules vary in depth, no Nation is yet running its full operations on it, and we would rather say that here than have you find it out.

• Keep your sign-in to yourself; you are responsible for what is done with it. If you administer an organization, switch on two-step sign-in — the Trust page will tell you who has not.
• An organization's administrators decide who may join it and what each person can reach. We do not add people to an organization or change their access on our own.
• We may suspend an account for abuse, for a security problem, or where use of the service is unlawful. If we do, we say why.

An organization owns the records and files it puts into the service. We do not acquire a licence to use them for anything beyond running the service for that organization — not for training a model, not for aggregate analytics, not for research, not for marketing. The privacy policy says the same in more detail and it is not decoration.

You can export everything at any time from the Trust page: every table as one file, every uploaded document as one archive. On termination we delete the organization's data on request and confirm it in writing.

We own the software, the design and the compilations we build from public data. Nothing here transfers that.

The funding, contract, lobbying and officials records come from federal open data, republished as governments published them.

• It is what was disclosed, which is not the same as what was spent. Disclosure thresholds, reporting lags and corrections all mean the record is incomplete by construction.
• It is federal only. Provincial funding, provincial lobbyist registries and regulator project registries are not in here.
• We do not correct the source. Where a figure looks wrong, it is usually wrong at the source, and the fix is with the department that published it.
• Use it to know where to look and who to ask. Do not use it as an audited financial statement, because it is not one and we do not present it as one.

This part matters more than the rest of this page, so it is written carefully.

• If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. This website is not an emergency service and cannot respond to one.
• The services listed are run by other organizations, not by us. We do not operate them, staff them, fund them or vouch for the care they give. We list them and we link to each one so you can check with them directly.
• We publish a phone number only when we have found it on that organization's own website, and we show when we last checked. A number that stops matching is taken down rather than left up. That is a real check on a real schedule, and it is still not a guarantee — hours change, lines close, organizations move.
• Coverage is national services plus Alberta. Every page says so. It is not a national directory and we do not let it look like one.

If you find a wrong or dead number here, tell us at hello@nationworks.ca and we will check it. That is the fastest way this list stays true.

• Do not try to reach another organization's data, and do not probe for ways to. The isolation between organizations is tested; testing it yourself without asking is not research, and we will treat it as an intrusion. If you want to test it, ask first and we will help.
• Do not scrape the public pages into a competing product or hammer them beyond ordinary reading. Public means a person can read it, not that it is a free data feed. Ask, and we will usually say yes.
• Do not use member, staff or tenant information for anything the organization holding it has not authorized.
• Do not use the service to break a law, to harass anyone, or to send bulk mail that the recipients did not agree to receive.

The public pages and a free account are free, and are intended to stay free.

An organization workspace is not priced yet. No organization is being charged today, and nothing on this service takes a payment. When there is a price it will be agreed in writing with each organization before it applies — no card on file quietly starting to bill, and no price appearing on an invoice that was not agreed first.

We aim to keep the service up and we watch it, but there is no uptime commitment, no support-response commitment, and no service credit today. The service is provided as it is. A Nation should not put a life-safety or legally-mandated deadline in the hands of any single piece of software, this one included.

Where the law allows us to limit liability, we limit it to what the organization has paid us in the previous twelve months — which, today, is nothing. That is the honest position for a service at this stage, and it is exactly why the export exists and why it is one click on the Trust page.

Nothing here limits liability for anything the law does not allow to be limited.

An organization can stop at any time, for any reason, and take everything with it. We can end an organization's access for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, and we will give notice and time to export unless the law prevents it.

The export is deliberately not a favour we grant on the way out. It is a button on the Trust page that works every day of the agreement.

If these terms change in substance, the date at the top changes and organizations are told by email.

These terms are governed by the laws of Alberta and the laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Alberta have jurisdiction. Nothing here removes a right a Nation holds under treaty, under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, or under its own law.

Questions: hello@nationworks.ca.