Contributor Agreement

1. About this agreement

This Contributor Agreement is between you and Uganda Culture, Uganda, which runs Uganda Culture. It sets out the terms on which you share material with us and the terms on which we may publish it. It is read with our Terms of Use, our Content Policy and our Privacy Policy.

2. Who it applies to

This agreement applies to anyone who sends material to Uganda Culture, whether through our contribution form, by email or in person. It covers stories, photos, audio, video links, recipes, events, oral histories, corrections that include new material, and anything else you share for publication. It applies whether you contribute with an account or without one. You accept it when you send a contribution, and members accept it when they register.

3. You keep your copyright

You keep ownership of everything you contribute. This agreement does not transfer your copyright to us. You remain free to use your own material in any way you wish, including publishing it elsewhere.

4. The licence you give us

When you contribute, you give Uganda Culture a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to:

• publish your contribution on Uganda Culture and in the services connected to it, such as our newsletter, our cultural map and our API;
• edit it for accuracy, clarity, length and style, in line with our editorial standards;
• translate it into other languages;
• crop, resize and format photos and media, and transcribe audio and video;
• make it available to others under the licence shown on the record.

Non-exclusive means you can give the same rights to anyone else. Text that becomes part of a Uganda Culture record is made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photos, audio and video carry the licence we agree with you, which may be an open licence or all rights reserved. Our Copyright and Licensing page explains these licences.

5. Your promises

When you contribute, you promise that:

• the material is yours, or you have the permission of its owner to share it on these terms;
• you have the consent of every living person who can be recognised in it or who is named in it, and of a parent or guardian for any child under 18;
• for an oral history, the narrator has agreed both to the recording and to its publication;
• it contains nothing restricted or sacred unless the community concerned has agreed that it may be shared;
• it is true to the best of your knowledge, and you have told us your sources;
• it is not generated by artificial intelligence and presented as genuine;
• it does not break the law or our Community Guidelines.

If any of these stops being true, please tell us straight away. If we receive a credible complaint that a promise was not kept, for example a claim of copyright or a report that someone did not consent, we may hide or remove your contribution while we look into it, as described in our Takedown and Correction Policy. We will contact you and give you the chance to respond.

6. How you are credited

You choose how you are credited: by your name, by another name, or not publicly. We show the credit you choose on the record. If you choose not to be credited publicly, we still keep a private record of who contributed, so that we can contact you and show that consent was given. You can change your credit choice later by contacting us.

7. Review and our right not to publish

Every contribution is reviewed by an editor and approved by a separate person before an editor publishes it. We check sources, consent, credit and sensitivity. Material a community holds closely needs community sign-off before it is published.

We may decide not to publish a contribution, or to publish only part of it, for any reason consistent with our Content Policy. We are not obliged to publish anything. Where we can, we will tell you if your contribution is not published.

When we edit your contribution, we aim to keep its meaning and your voice. If an edit changes the substance of what you said, or adds material from other sources, we will make that clear on the record. If you are unhappy with how your contribution appears, please suggest a correction or contact us, and we will look at it again.

8. Withdrawing your contribution

You may ask us to withdraw your contribution at any time, through our removal request form or by emailing [email protected]. When you withdraw it, we stop using it in the future: we hide it from the site, our API and search, and we will not include it in new material.

Please understand that copies already shared under an open licence cannot be recalled. Anyone who copied your material while it was available under CC BY-SA 4.0 or another open licence may keep using that copy under the licence's terms. We may also keep a private record of the contribution and its consent where the law requires it or to show that consent was given.

9. No payment

Contributions are voluntary. We do not pay for contributions, and you will not receive royalties or any other payment for the use of your material. Uganda Culture is free to read and carries no adverts.

10. Your personal information

When you contribute, we keep your name, contact details, your credit choice and a record of the version of this agreement you accepted, with the time. We use this information to review your contribution, to contact you about it and to show that consent was given. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information, how long we keep it and how you can ask for a copy of it or for it to be erased through your data requests.

11. Contributors under 18

If you are under 18, you need the consent of a parent or guardian to contribute. By contributing, you confirm that your parent or guardian has agreed. We may ask to confirm this before we publish.

12. Changes to this agreement

We may update this agreement from time to time. Each version has a number, and we record which version you accepted and when. A change does not affect contributions made under an earlier version, unless you agree. When this agreement changes, members are asked to accept the new version when they next sign in. If you do not accept it, you may continue to use the site to read, but you will need to accept the current version before you contribute again.

13. Law and contact

This agreement is governed by the laws of Uganda, and the courts of Uganda have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you have a question about it, please contact us or email us at [email protected].