This page covers the material on this site: who publishes it, what may be done with it, what the limits of it are, and where the responsibility for it sits. It is a plain statement rather than a long one, because the arrangement here is genuinely simple.
Who publishes this
This site is published independently and is not the site of any company, association or event. It carries no advertising network and takes no payment for editorial placement, which is stated on the contact page as well because it is the thing most often asked.
Correspondence goes to [email protected]. There is no postal address to give here: the site is written work rather than an organisation with premises.
The written material
The prose, the diagrams and the tools on this site are original work and remain the property of whoever wrote them.
Quoting is free. A passage with attribution and a link needs no permission and no notification. That is the ordinary way a reference gets used and it is welcome.
Whole pages, translations and the diagrams are worth an email first, and the answer is usually yes. The diagrams in particular carry each page’s own figures, so they tend to need a note saying where they came from before they make sense elsewhere.
What is not available is presenting the material as somebody else’s own work, which is the case the dashed box on the chart marks.
Accuracy, and the limits of it
This site describes how conferences are organised and records events that were held. Both kinds of claim can be wrong: practice varies between events, and the record of a small conference from fifteen years ago is frequently thin.
Written carefully, and still not a warranty.
The material is offered as a description rather than as advice, and no warranty is given that it fits any particular event or decision. Anybody organising something real should treat it as a starting point and check the parts that matter against their own venue, budget and jurisdiction.
Corrections are wanted and are acted on. How to send one usefully is on the contact page, and the standard the conference index holds itself to is described on the index itself.
Names and trade marks
Conference names, company names, product names and project names appear throughout this site because it is not possible to describe the subject without them. They remain the property of their respective owners, and their use here is descriptive: naming an event in order to write about it, which is what a reference does.
No endorsement by any of them is claimed or implied, and no relationship with any of them is asserted anywhere on this site.
Links to other sites
Pages here link outward, and one page carries a banner linking to a third-party site. Those destinations are outside this site’s control, their content can change at any time, and no responsibility is taken for what appears on them.
A link is not a recommendation unless the surrounding sentence says it is. Where a page links to something as an example of a practice, the link is doing the work of a citation.
How this page changes
Quietly, and with the date of the change carried by the site’s own footer rather than announced here. There is no version history on this page, because the current terms are the only ones that matter and an archive of superseded ones would only obscure them.
What is collected about readers, as distinct from what may be done with the material, is on the privacy page.
Questions
Can material from this site be quoted?
Yes, with attribution and a link, and without asking. That is the ordinary way a reference gets used. Whole pages, translations and the diagrams are worth an email first, and the answer is usually yes.
Is permission needed to link to a page here?
No, and there is no need to say so either. Linking is how the web works and nothing on this site attempts to restrict it.
Is the information here reliable enough to plan an event on?
It is a description rather than advice, and no warranty is given that it fits a particular event. Anybody organising something real should use it as a starting point and check the parts that matter against their own venue, budget and jurisdiction.
Why are other organisations’ names used?
Because the subject cannot be described without them. They remain the property of their owners, and the use here is descriptive: naming something in order to write about it. No endorsement or relationship is claimed.
Who is responsible for linked sites?
Their own operators. Those destinations are outside this site’s control and can change at any time. A link here is not a recommendation unless the sentence around it says so.