Synergy In Construction, LLC ("SynC") Construction Industry Platform — Wiki Standards Version 2.2
This Contributor License Agreement ("Agreement") clarifies the intellectual property rights granted with Contributions from any person or entity to the SynC Wiki Standards library. This Agreement is for your protection as a Contributor as well as the protection of SynC and its users; it does not change your rights to use your own Contributions for any other purpose.
By submitting a Contribution to SynC, you accept and agree to the following terms and conditions.
"Contribution" means any original work of authorship, including any modifications or additions to existing content, that is intentionally submitted by you to SynC for inclusion in the Wiki Standards library. "Submitted" means any form of electronic communication sent to SynC, including but not limited to content submitted through the SynC platform interface, pull requests, issue comments, or email.
For the avoidance of doubt, a Contribution is defined by its purpose — content offered for inclusion in a Wiki Standard — not by the channel through which it reaches SynC. Participation in discussion, commentary, or feedback features of the SynC platform, including any discussion threads associated with a Wiki Standard, is not in itself a Contribution and is not licensed under this Agreement.
"You" (or "Contributor") means the individual or legal entity submitting a Contribution. For legal entities, the entity making a Contribution and all entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with that entity are considered a single Contributor.
"Wiki Standards" means the openly licensed specification content maintained within the SynC platform and designated as community-contributed standards. A "Wiki Standard" is an individual standard within the Wiki Standards library.
"Construction Project" means a single, identifiable undertaking for the design, engineering, procurement, construction, installation, alteration, commissioning, or maintenance of a specific building, structure, facility, or other built work, for a particular owner and a defined scope of work. A standing practice, program, or portfolio comprising multiple such undertakings is not a single Construction Project, and the preparation of a reusable specification, template, office master specification, or specification library intended for use across more than one Construction Project is not undertaken within a single Construction Project.
"Project Use" means, with respect to a Wiki Standard, use of that Wiki Standard in connection with one Construction Project, including: importing or copying the Wiki Standard into project documentation; configuring the Wiki Standard by means of its built-in datasheet fields; editing, adapting, supplementing, excerpting, or combining its content to produce a project specification for that Construction Project; and reproducing and distributing the resulting project specification to the participants in that Construction Project — which may include the owner, design professionals, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and the authorities having jurisdiction over that Construction Project — for the purpose of designing, bidding, permitting, procuring, constructing, commissioning, or maintaining that Construction Project. Project Use does not include making a Wiki Standard, or an adaptation of one, available to the public.
"Attribution" means the public-facing record that associates a Contribution with the Contributor, which may include the Contributor's display name, account identifier, the name of the Contributor's affiliated organization, and contemporaneous Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role as recorded at the time of Contribution.
"Anonymization" means the modification of a Contributor's Attribution to remove identifying information about the Contributor and the specific name of their affiliated organization while preserving disclosure-grade information about the Contributor's professional role and the organization's industry classification. Specifically, Anonymization replaces the Contributor's display name and personal account identifier with the non-identifying designation "Former Contributor," removes the specific name of the Contributor's affiliated organization from the public-facing Attribution, and preserves the Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role recorded at the time of Contribution. Anonymization operates on the public-facing Attribution only and does not affect the limited, non-public records SynC retains under §2A.4; as explained in that Section, the overall treatment of a Contributor's attribution data is pseudonymization rather than anonymization for the purposes of data-protection law.
"Account Deletion" means the termination of a Contributor's SynC account, including any subsequent purge of personal information from active systems, as governed by SynC's account-lifecycle policy.
"Affiliation Type" means the categorical classification of the organization with which the Contributor was affiliated at the time of Contribution (for example, "Manufacturer," "Engineering Firm," "Specialty Contractor," "Owner," or "Independent Consultant"), as recorded on the organization's profile within the SynC platform.
"Primary Specialty" means the specific industry sub-classification of the Contributor's affiliated organization (for example, "Pipe & Tubing Manufacturer," "MEP Engineering Firm," or "Aviation Owner"), as recorded on the organization's profile within the SynC platform and scoped by the Affiliation Type. Where the organization records additional sub-classifications, references to "Primary Specialty" in this Agreement include such additional Secondary Specialties as may be disclosed in the public-facing Attribution.
"Professional Role" means the categorical classification of the Contributor's professional role within their affiliated organization at the time of Contribution (for example, "Engineer," "Specifier," "Project Manager," or "Principal"), optionally including discipline (such as "Mechanical" or "Electrical") and seniority level, as recorded on the Contributor's membership record within the SynC platform.
Where the Contributor is not affiliated with any organization, the Contributor is itself classified by a categorical Affiliation Type (for example, "Unaffiliated Individual") together with a Primary Specialty and Professional Role recorded on the Contributor's own account; references in this Agreement to the Contributor's affiliated organization, Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role apply to that account-level classification, and Anonymization preserves it on the same terms.
You hereby grant to SynC and to recipients of content distributed by SynC a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contributions and such derivative works, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
All Contributions to the Wiki Standards library are made under CC BY-SA 4.0. This means:
The license granted in this Section 2 is supplemented by the Project Use Permission in Section 2C, which separately permits use of a Wiki Standard within a single Construction Project. Section 2C grants an additional permission; it does not restrict, and is not a condition on, any right granted by CC BY-SA 4.0.
You acknowledge and agree that the license granted in Section 2 and the permission granted in Section 2C are irrevocable for the lifetime of the Contribution and survive termination of your SynC account by any means, including voluntary Account Deletion, account suspension, account merger, or removal of your account for cause.
Accordingly:
Account Deletion does not revoke, terminate, or otherwise affect the license granted in Section 2 or the permission granted in Section 2C. Each Contribution you have made remains available under CC BY-SA 4.0 in the Wiki Standards library after your Account Deletion, and SynC and all recipients of content distributed by SynC retain all rights and permissions granted in Sections 2 and 2C.
SynC may continue to display the Attribution associated with your Contributions after Account Deletion, including in the public-facing Wiki Standards library and in any project that has imported a Contribution by reference. Preservation of Attribution is a feature of the Wiki Standards library that protects the integrity of the attribution record and the licensing chain required by CC BY-SA 4.0.
Upon Account Deletion, the public-facing Attribution on each of your Contributions is automatically anonymized. Anonymization (a) replaces your personal display name and account identifier with the non-identifying designation "Former Contributor" carrying no per-account identifier, (b) removes the specific name of your affiliated organization from the public-facing Attribution, and (c) preserves the Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role recorded at the time of each Contribution as set forth in §2B, in order to preserve disclosure information about the institutional context of the Contribution. The Contribution itself remains in the Wiki Standards library.
Anonymization is not optional and is not a remedy you elect; it is the standard treatment of public-facing Attribution following Account Deletion under this Agreement. SynC will inform you of this treatment at the time you initiate Account Deletion.
You expressly acknowledge that you do not retain a right to require removal, retraction, deletion, or other withdrawal of any Contribution from the Wiki Standards library or from any project that has imported a Contribution by reference, except as required by applicable law. The automatic Anonymization described in this §2A.3 is the sole and exclusive limitation on the public-facing visibility of your identity in connection with your Contributions following Account Deletion.
Anonymization under §2A.3 operates on the public-facing Attribution only. It removes your identity from every public-facing surface of the Wiki Standards library, so that a member of the public viewing the Wiki Standards cannot identify you as the Contributor of a Contribution.
Separately, and as a matter distinct from the public-facing Attribution, SynC retains a limited, non-public, access-restricted record that links each Contribution to the Contributor who made it. This retained record may include your account identifier and the specific name of your affiliated organization at the time of Contribution. SynC retains this record only as reasonably necessary to:
Because this retained record makes it possible to re-associate an otherwise anonymized Contribution with you, the treatment of your Contribution-attribution data, taken as a whole, is pseudonymization rather than anonymization for the purposes of data-protection law. The retained record remains personal data, and applicable data-protection law continues to apply to it.
Where applicable data-protection law (including but not limited to the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") and analogous statutes) provides a right to erasure of personal data, you and SynC agree that:
Nothing in this Section limits any erasure right you may have with respect to personal data held by SynC outside the public-facing Attribution and the limited retained record described in this §2A.4.
You acknowledge and agree that the public-facing Attribution for each Contribution may include the Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role recorded at the time the Contribution was submitted (collectively, the "Contemporaneous Affiliation"). The Contemporaneous Affiliation reflects historical fact about the institutional context in which the Contribution was made and is intended to preserve the disclosure information necessary for readers to weigh the Contribution against relevant industry interests, comparable to conflict-of-interest disclosure conventions in academic publishing and professional standards bodies.
The Contemporaneous Affiliation:
If you believe a Contemporaneous Affiliation value recorded for a Contribution is factually inaccurate (for example, an incorrect Affiliation Type for your organization at the time), you may request a correction through SynC's standard support channels. Corrections update the historical record; the Contemporaneous Affiliation is not erased or hidden as a remedy.
The specific name of your affiliated organization at the time of Contribution may be retained by SynC as part of the limited, non-public, access-restricted records described in §2A.4, but is not part of the public-facing Attribution after Anonymization.
In addition to, and without limiting, the license granted in Section 2, you grant to every person a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable permission to make Project Use of any Wiki Standard that incorporates your Contribution.
A project specification produced and used within the scope of Project Use is not required to be licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, and the ShareAlike condition of CC BY-SA 4.0 does not apply to it. The person making Project Use may treat the resulting project specification as their own confidential work product, private to the Construction Project for which it was produced.
This permission does not waive attribution. Attribution information embedded in or accompanying a Wiki Standard shall be retained in any project specification produced under this permission.
The Project Use Permission applies only to Project Use as defined in Section 1. It does not extend to the following uses, and the CC BY-SA 4.0 license in Section 2 — including its Attribution and ShareAlike conditions — continues to govern them in full:
Where a use is not Project Use, CC BY-SA 4.0 governs that use in full.
The Project Use Permission is an additional permission granted alongside the CC BY-SA 4.0 license in Section 2. It does not replace that license, and any person may instead rely on CC BY-SA 4.0 for any use. The Project Use Permission grants additional latitude only; it imposes no additional term, condition, or restriction on any right granted by CC BY-SA 4.0, and it does not limit the rights of the public in any Wiki Standard under CC BY-SA 4.0. Every Wiki Standard remains available to the public under CC BY-SA 4.0 independent of this permission.
You represent and warrant that:
Each of your Contributions is your original creation, written independently by you or under your direct supervision. Your Contributions are not copied from, derived from, or based upon:
For the purposes of this §3.1, whether a Contribution is "copied from, derived from, or based upon" a source listed above is determined by your own use of that source in creating the Contribution. Your use of a general-purpose AI system to assist in creating a Contribution does not, by itself, cause the Contribution to be "derived from" or "based upon" a listed source by reason of any material on which that AI system may have been trained, provided you have complied with §3.2.
You have not used proprietary specification content (including but not limited to MasterSpec, SpecLink, or proprietary office master specifications) as a reference, template, or starting point when creating your Contribution. Your Contribution was written independently using:
Where you used an AI system to assist in creating a Contribution, you represent and warrant that:
You do not represent or warrant anything about the data on which a general-purpose AI system was trained. The parties acknowledge that the training data of a general-purpose AI system is not publicly disclosed and cannot be verified by you or by SynC, and that no representation in this Agreement shall be construed as a warranty that any AI system was not trained on proprietary specification content. The originality of an AI-assisted Contribution is assured by the controls in this Section — clean prompt inputs, reliance on the public and factual sources listed in §3.2, and your review of the output — and not by any assertion about an AI system's training data.
You have the legal right to grant the license stated in Section 2 and the permission stated in Section 2C. If your Contribution includes content created during the course of employment, you represent that:
If your Contribution includes any content not originally authored by you, you identify such content, its source, and any applicable license at the time of submission. You warrant that any such third-party content is compatible with CC BY-SA 4.0.
You understand that SynC is under no obligation to use, accept, or include your Contribution. SynC may edit, modify, restructure, or decline any Contribution at its sole discretion.
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless SynC and its officers, directors, members, employees, and users from and against any claims, damages, losses, costs, or expenses (including reasonable attorney's fees) arising from any breach of your representations and warranties in this Agreement, including but not limited to claims that your Contribution infringes the intellectual property rights of any third party.
You agree to notify SynC promptly if you become aware that any of your representations in this Agreement are or become inaccurate.
Any disputes arising from this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, without regard to conflict of law provisions. Any legal action shall be brought in the courts of Wyoming or the federal courts for the District of Wyoming.
By submitting a Contribution to the SynC Wiki Standards library through any SynC platform interface, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to the terms of this Agreement, including the irrevocable nature of the license grant and the survival of the grant and Attribution after Account Deletion as set forth in Section 2A, and the Project Use Permission set forth in Section 2C.
This Agreement is effective as of your first Contribution to the SynC Wiki Standards library.
Synergy In Construction, LLC A Wyoming Limited Liability Company