SynC™

Contributor License Agreement

Effective September 23, 2026 · Version 2.5

Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

Synergy In Construction, LLC ("SynC") Construction Industry Platform — Wiki Standards

Effective Date: September 23, 2026 Version: 2.5

Purpose

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.

1. Definitions

"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. Content of that kind is governed by the Terms of Service — in particular §8.5 (Feedback), where you direct it to SynC, and §5.3.1 (limits on SynC's use of your content), where you do not, or the successor provisions of the Terms of Service in effect at the time of your submission — and not by 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 (or, while an Attribution Election under §2A.5 is in force, the Contributor's Designated Pseudonym in its place), 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.

"Attribution Election" means an election by a Contributor under §2A.5 that the public-facing Attribution for one or more of their Contributions identify them by a Designated Pseudonym rather than by their display name and personal account identifier. An Attribution Election is made and withdrawn by the Contributor, is distinct from Anonymization, and does not depend on Account Deletion.

"Designated Pseudonym" means the stable, non-identifying label that SynC assigns to a Contributor on their first Attribution Election and uses in place of that Contributor's display name and personal account identifier in the public-facing Attribution for every Contribution to which an Attribution Election applies.

"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.

2. Grant of License

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:

  • Anyone may share and adapt your Contributions
  • Attribution must be given to contributors
  • Derivative works must use the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license (ShareAlike)
  • No additional restrictions may be applied

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, and by the Additional License to SynC in Section 2D. Sections 2C and 2D each grant an additional permission; neither restricts, nor is a condition on, any right granted by CC BY-SA 4.0.

2A. Irrevocability of Contribution and Attribution Preservation

You acknowledge and agree that the license granted in Section 2, the permission granted in Section 2C, and the license granted in Section 2D 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. The rights granted to SynC in Section 2E likewise survive termination of your account by any means.

Accordingly:

2A.1 Survival of the Grant

Account Deletion does not revoke, terminate, or otherwise affect the license granted in Section 2, the permission granted in Section 2C, or the license granted in Section 2D. 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, 2C, and 2D.

2A.2 Preservation of Attribution

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.

2A.3 Automatic Anonymization on Account Deletion; No Right of Removal

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, and it applies whether or not you have made an Attribution Election under §2A.5. 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 that this Agreement imposes on the public-facing visibility of your identity in connection with your Contributions by reason of Account Deletion. It does not limit the Attribution Election described in §2A.5, which you make for yourself and which does not depend on Account Deletion. Upon Account Deletion, Anonymization applies whether or not an Attribution Election is in force.

2A.4 Data-Protection Law: Pseudonymization and Retained Records

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:

  • verify the licensing chain (chain of title) for the Wiki Standards — that is, to be able to demonstrate that each Contribution was validly licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, the Project Use Permission in Section 2C, and the Additional License in Section 2D by the person entitled to license it;
  • establish, exercise, or defend legal claims, including the enforcement of your representations, warranties, and indemnification obligations under Sections 3, 5, and 6; and
  • comply with SynC's legal, audit, and accounting obligations.

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:

  • the Anonymization mechanism described in §2A.3 satisfies that right with respect to the public-facing Attribution of your Contributions, which after Anonymization no longer identifies you to the public; and
  • SynC's continued retention of the limited, non-public record described in this Section is necessary for, and is carried out under, the exception for the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims (GDPR Article 17(3)(e)) and any analogous exception under other applicable law. SynC retains that record only for so long as it may reasonably be needed for the purposes stated above, applies data-minimization and access controls to it, and does not use it for any other purpose.

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.

2A.5 Contributor Election of Pseudonymous Attribution

The election. At any time, and for your own reasons, you may elect that the public-facing Attribution for your Contributions identify you by a Designated Pseudonym rather than by your display name and personal account identifier (an "Attribution Election"). You may make an Attribution Election for:

  • (a) a single Contribution;
  • (b) all of your Contributions to one Wiki Standard, including Contributions you make to that Wiki Standard after the Election; or
  • (c) all of your Contributions.

Where Elections at different scopes conflict, the more specific Election governs.

The Election is yours. An Attribution Election is your own designation of how you are to be identified. You make it and you withdraw it, at your own choosing. SynC does not make one for you, does not grant one as a remedy, and does not decide whether you may make one. An Attribution Election is not a sanction, a finding, a restriction, or a response to any erratum, hold, revocation, notice, or complaint, and it is not evidence of any of those things.

SynC will not ask you to make one. No question about an Attribution Election is put to you when you accept this Agreement, when you make a Contribution, when a Contribution is adopted or published, or in any notice SynC sends you about an action under §2E or Terms of Service §5A.6. A notice may tell you where the setting is; it does not ask you to use it. You make an Election by changing the setting yourself, on the Contribution within the Services or on your own contributions page, and you may change it there at any time.

What an Election renders. While an Attribution Election is in force for a Contribution, the public-facing Attribution for that Contribution (a) identifies you by the Designated Pseudonym in place of your display name and personal account identifier; (b) omits the specific name of your affiliated organization; and (c) preserves the Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty, and Professional Role recorded at the time of the Contribution, including any discipline and seniority level the Professional Role records, as §2B provides.

A "Designated Pseudonym" is a stable, non-identifying label that SynC assigns to you on your first Attribution Election and uses for every Contribution to which an Election applies. It is stable so that the Contributions attributed to it remain identifiable as the work of one Contributor, which is what the attribution and licensing chain requires and what lets you claim that body of work as yours if you later choose to. It is not reassigned to any other person. You acknowledge that a stable pseudonym links your elected Contributions to one another, and that disclosing your authorship of any one of them may associate you with the rest.

It is reversible. You may change or withdraw an Attribution Election at any time, at any scope, in either direction. SynC keeps a limited, non-public record of each change: who made it, when, at what scope, and in which direction. No Attribution Election, and no change to one, is published, in the public moderation log or on any other public surface.

Effect under CC BY-SA 4.0. By making an Attribution Election you designate the Designated Pseudonym as the identification of you as creator to be retained under CC BY-SA 4.0 §3(a)(1)(A), which contemplates identification by a designated pseudonym. To the extent an Attribution Election operates as a request that attribution information be removed rather than replaced, you make it as an advance request under CC BY-SA 4.0 §3(a)(3), and SynC will give effect to it to the extent reasonably practicable. Neither provision reaches copies of a Contribution already distributed by SynC or by any other licensee, or the records of any third party.

What an Election does not change.

  • It does not affect the license granted in §2, the permission granted in §2C, the license granted in §2D, or the rights granted in §2E, each of which remains irrevocable as §2A provides.
  • It does not affect the limited, non-public record described in §2A.4, at any scope. An Attribution Election under this §2A.5 and Anonymization under §2A.3 are both pseudonymization for the purposes of §2A.4: in each case SynC retains the record §2A.4 describes.
  • It does not remove, retract or withdraw any Contribution, and it creates no right to have one removed (§2A.3).
  • It does not affect the Contemporaneous Affiliation disclosed under §2B, which is preserved as set out above.
  • It does not displace Anonymization. Upon Account Deletion, the public-facing Attribution on each of your Contributions is anonymized under §2A.3 whether or not an Attribution Election is in force, and the designation "Former Contributor" applies in place of any Designated Pseudonym. An Attribution Election survives Account Deletion as a record and has no further effect on public-facing Attribution after it.

2B. Contemporaneous Affiliation Disclosure

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:

  • Reflects values recorded on your affiliated organization's profile (Affiliation Type, Primary Specialty) and on your own membership record (Professional Role) at the moment of Contribution, and is frozen as a historical snapshot rather than tracking subsequent changes to those records.
  • Was visible to you at the time of Contribution as part of the public-facing Attribution that would result from the submission.
  • Is preserved as part of the public-facing Attribution after Account Deletion and after Anonymization under §2A.3, and while an Attribution Election under §2A.5 is in force. Anonymization removes your personal identifying information and the specific name of your affiliated organization from the Attribution, and an Attribution Election replaces your display name and account identifier and omits that organization name; neither removes the Contemporaneous Affiliation, which carries no personally identifying information about you.
  • Is not altered by subsequent changes to your affiliated organization's profile, your employment, or your role within the SynC platform.

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.

2C. Project Use Permission

2C.1 Grant of the Project Use Permission

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.

2C.2 Limits of the Project Use 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:

  • making a Wiki Standard, or any adaptation of it, available to the public, including by posting it on a publicly accessible website or procurement portal or otherwise distributing it to the public at large;
  • use of a Wiki Standard beyond the scope of a single Construction Project, including its incorporation into a reusable specification, template, office master specification, or specification library intended for use across more than one Construction Project;
  • redistribution of a Wiki Standard, or a substantially intact copy of one, as a standalone standard or specification rather than as a project specification produced for a specific Construction Project.

Where a use is not Project Use, CC BY-SA 4.0 governs that use in full.

2C.3 Relationship to CC BY-SA 4.0

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.

2D. Additional License to SynC

2D.1 Grant

In addition to, and without limiting, the license granted in Section 2 and the permission granted in Section 2C, and to the extent any such use requires a license under copyright or database right, you grant to SynC a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, analyze, and prepare derivative works of your Contributions in connection with operating, providing, developing, improving, securing, and moderating the Services and SynC's present and future products and features.

Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, such use includes: training, evaluating, and operating machine-learning models and retrieval systems; generating embeddings, indexes, analytics, statistics, and aggregate or derived datasets; automated quality, consistency, completeness, and conflict checking; cross-referencing, linking, and classification; and uses in features not yet developed.

2D.2 Derived Materials

"Derived Materials" means material generated by SynC from a Contribution that does not itself reproduce, or serve as a substitute for, the protected expression of the Contribution — including models and model weights, embeddings, indexes, analytics, statistics, aggregate and derived datasets, and the outputs of any such system.

Derived Materials are not adaptations of your Contribution for the purposes of this Agreement, and the ShareAlike condition of CC BY-SA 4.0 does not apply to them. SynC may use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, and sublicense Derived Materials without that condition attaching.

For the avoidance of doubt, this Section does not apply to SynC's publication of a Contribution, or of an edited or adapted version of one, as Wiki Standards content. That content is an adaptation, it remains licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, and nothing in this Section permits SynC to publish it on any other terms.

2D.3 Relationship to Section 2 and to the Public

This Section grants an additional permission to SynC only. It:

  • imposes no additional term, condition, or restriction on any right granted by CC BY-SA 4.0;
  • does not limit the rights of the public in any Wiki Standard, which remains available to the public under CC BY-SA 4.0 independent of this Section;
  • does not reduce the Attribution recorded and displayed under §2B; and
  • does not limit your own use of your Contribution for any purpose, including any use described in §2D.1.

This Section is drafted to operate only where a license is required. Nothing in it is an admission by either party that any particular use of a work requires permission under copyright or database right.

2E. Editorial and Moderation License

2E.1 Grant

You grant SynC the right, at any time and at its sole discretion, to review, edit, modify, restructure, reformat, translate, annotate (including by erratum), supersede, relocate, decline, withhold from display, remove, or revoke any Contribution or any Wiki Standard incorporating it — including for editorial quality or consistency, legal compliance, response to a copyright or other legal notice, or public safety.

SynC has no obligation to publish, to continue publishing, to restore, or to preserve any Contribution.

SynC does give notice of certain actions, and nothing in this Section displaces those commitments. Where SynC places a hold on material within, or revokes, an adopted Wiki Standards revision containing your Contribution; hides a revision you submitted; resets your display name; or resets the title of a Wiki Standard where a revision you submitted supplied either the title replaced or the title adopted in its place; and when it reverses any of those actions, SynC will notify you, within the Services and by email to the address on your account, and will record the action in the public moderation log with the reason category. Where the action is a hold or a revocation, Terms of Service §5A.6 states what SynC does and the notice it gives. SynC may omit or limit a notice only where required by law or court order. A notice under this paragraph carries the reason category SynC recorded. It does not carry the free-text note a moderator records internally, which SynC does not publish on any surface, and nothing in this Section obliges SynC to explain, justify, or enter into correspondence about an action beyond the category recorded.

The circumstances in which SynC issues an erratum on, places a hold on material within, or revokes an adopted Wiki Standards revision, and the limits SynC accepts on that authority, are stated in Terms of Service §5A.6.

2E.2 Moral Rights

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, you waive — and where waiver is not permitted, agree not to assert against SynC or against any recipient of content distributed by SynC — any moral rights or rights of a similar nature in your Contributions, including any right of integrity, right of attribution beyond that provided in §2B, or right to object to derogatory treatment, in each case to the extent necessary to permit the exercise of the rights granted in this Agreement.

2E.3 No Representation Implied

SynC's exercise of any right under this Section is not a representation or statement by SynC about the accuracy, quality, originality, or lawfulness of any Contribution, or about the conduct of any Contributor.

2E.4 Community Moderators and Administrators

SynC may exercise the rights granted in this Section through its own staff or through individuals it appoints to a community moderation role within the Services (at this version, the roles the Services name WikiModerator and WikiAdmin). Those roles are held by individuals, who may or may not be SynC staff. An action a community moderator or administrator takes within the authority of that role is an action under this Section, and §2E.1's notice commitments and §2E.3 apply to it.

Holding a community moderation role places no one outside this Agreement. A community moderator or administrator who is not SynC staff is a Contributor as to every Contribution they make, accepts this Agreement in the same way and on the same terms as any other Contributor, and is bound by it in full. The only Wiki Standards content not licensed under this Agreement is content SynC authors itself, through its staff and its own standards-authoring account, which is SynC's own work and is not a Contribution.

3. Originality Warranty

You represent and warrant that:

3.1 Original Work

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:

  • MasterSpec (ARCOM/Deltek) content, including specification text, evaluative commentary, or editor's notes
  • BSD SpecLink (Deltek) content, including specification language, linking logic descriptions, or editorial content
  • Any other proprietary specification system or copyrighted specification library
  • Any employer's proprietary specifications or work product, unless you have written authorization to contribute such content

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.

3.2 No Proprietary Content

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:

  • Your own professional knowledge and experience
  • Publicly available codes and standards (e.g., ASTM, NFPA, IEEE, UL, NEMA, NEC, IBC)
  • Publicly available government guide specifications (e.g., UFGS, VA Master Specs)
  • Manufacturer-published technical data and installation instructions
  • SynC's existing Wiki Standards content
  • AI-generated content produced in accordance with §3.2.1

3.2.1 AI-Assisted Content

Where you used an AI system to assist in creating a Contribution, you represent and warrant that:

  • you did not provide to the AI system — as a prompt, reference, template, or starting point — any MasterSpec, SpecLink, or other proprietary specification content, and you did not instruct the AI system to reproduce, paraphrase, or closely adapt any such content; and
  • you have reviewed the resulting content and, to the best of your knowledge, it does not copy, reproduce, or closely paraphrase the protected expression of any proprietary specification system, and it draws only on the kinds of public and factual sources listed in §3.2.

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.

3.3 Right to Contribute

You have the legal right to grant the license stated in Section 2, the permission stated in Section 2C, and the licenses stated in Sections 2D and 2E. If your Contribution includes content created during the course of employment, you represent that:

  • You have received permission from your employer to make the Contribution, OR
  • Your employer has waived any rights to the Contribution, OR
  • The Contribution was created entirely outside the scope of your employment

3.4 Third-Party Content

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.

4. No Obligation

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, as further provided in Section 2E.

5. Indemnification

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.

6. Ongoing Accuracy

You agree to notify SynC promptly if you become aware that any of your representations in this Agreement are or become inaccurate.

7. Dispute Resolution

Any disputes arising from this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to conflict of law provisions. Any legal action shall be brought in the state courts located in Orange County, Florida, or in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida (Orlando Division).

8. Acceptance

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 grants and the survival of the grants and Attribution after Account Deletion as set forth in Section 2A, the Project Use Permission set forth in Section 2C, the Additional License to SynC set forth in Section 2D, and the Editorial and Moderation License set forth in Section 2E.

This Agreement is effective as of your first Contribution to the SynC Wiki Standards library.

9. Summary of Changes from Version 2.4

This summary is provided for convenience and is not a substitute for the operative text above. Version 2.5 carries Contributor License Agreement Version 2.4 forward in full. It adds one Section, §2A.5, and one subsection, §2E.4; amends two sentences of §2A.3 and the second paragraph of §2E.1; and makes the conforming edits those changes require. Nothing in §2, §2C, §2D, §2E.2, §2E.3, §3, or §§4–8 is narrowed, and no right of a Contributor is reduced by this version.

  • New §2A.5 — Contributor Election of Pseudonymous Attribution. A Contributor may elect, at any time and reversibly, that the public-facing Attribution for one Contribution, for all of their Contributions to one Wiki Standard, or for all of their Contributions identify them by a stable Designated Pseudonym rather than by name. The election is the Contributor's own designation under CC BY-SA 4.0 §3(a)(1)(A) and is not a remedy SynC grants at its discretion; SynC does not prompt for it at acceptance, at contribution, at adoption or publication, or in any notice. It omits the specific name of the Contributor's affiliated organization and preserves the Contemporaneous Affiliation disclosed under §2B. It adds a capability and withdraws nothing.

  • §2A.3 is scoped, not narrowed. Two sentences of §2A.3 stated that Anonymization is "not a remedy you elect" and is "the sole and exclusive limitation on the public-facing visibility of your identity in connection with your Contributions following Account Deletion." Both are true of the Account Deletion treatment and were written about it; as written they would also have excluded §2A.5. They now say expressly that they are about Account Deletion. Anonymization on Account Deletion is unchanged in trigger, in effect, and in wording, applies whether or not an Attribution Election is in force, and takes precedence over one.

  • §2E.1 states the notice SynC gives. Version 2.4 said SynC had "no obligation to give notice of, or a reason for, any action taken under this Section," while the Terms of Service promised that such actions would be recorded with a reason category and affected parties notified. The Services perform the more generous term. §2E.1 now states that SynC notifies a Contributor, within the Services and by email, when a hold is placed on material within an adopted revision containing their Contribution, when such a revision is revoked, when a revision they submitted is hidden, when their display name is reset, when a Wiki Standard's title is reset from or to a title their revision supplied, and on the reversal of any of those, subject only to law and court order. What SynC continues to reserve is unchanged: no obligation to publish, to continue publishing, to restore, or to preserve any Contribution, and no obligation to explain an action beyond the recorded reason category. A moderator's internal note is never sent to a Contributor or published.

  • New §2E.4 — Community Moderators and Administrators. SynC may act under §2E through individuals holding a community moderation role, who may not be SynC staff. Holding such a role places no one outside this Agreement: a community moderator or administrator is a Contributor as to every Contribution they make. The only Wiki Standards content not licensed under this Agreement is content SynC authors itself.

  • Conforming edits. §1 defines "Attribution Election" and "Designated Pseudonym" and records, in the definition of "Attribution", that a Designated Pseudonym may stand in place of the display name; §2B records that the Contemporaneous Affiliation is preserved while an Attribution Election is in force.

Prospective effect. Like every version of this Agreement, Version 2.5 binds only Contributions made under it. Acceptance is contemporaneous with each Contribution, so a Contribution made while Version 2.4 was current remains governed by Version 2.4.

Synergy In Construction, LLC A Florida Limited Liability Company Email: legal@synergyinconstruction.com

Last Updated: September 23, 2026 Version: 2.5