Terms of service

These terms say what Savoir is for, what a community and Savoir owe each other, and how the arrangement ends. They apply to anybody who opens an account or asks a community's assistant a question.

The service

Savoir is an assistant that answers a community's members from the documents its board has uploaded: the declaration of co-ownership, the by-laws, the minutes, the financial statements, the maintenance logbook.

• Every answer names the document, the section and the page it came from, and the passage opens beside it.
• An answer with no source is not given: the assistant says it cannot find one and passes the question to the board.
• In Québec, the articles of the Civil Code an answer cites stand in a group of their own, under the legal-information notice. That is legal information and not legal advice, and the articles are read by hand against the official text rather than recalled from memory.

Savoir replaces neither the board, nor the manager, nor a lawyer. A community's decisions remain the community's.

The account and the community

An account is personal and belongs to an email address. You come in by a link sent to that address; where a deployment enables them, Google and Microsoft stand beside it as a second door. There is no password to choose and none to lose.

A community is the space of a syndicate, an association or an organization. The documents uploaded to it remain the community's: Savoir hosts them, makes them readable and cites them, and uses them for nothing else.

One community's data is never read by another. Every row and every file carries its community's id, and the database itself refuses any read that would cross that boundary.

The three roles

A community has three roles, each an access group whose rights are granted key by key:

• Admin: the community, its members, its settings and its billing.
• Manager: the documents, the review queue and the invitations.
• Member: asking questions and reading the answers.

An administrator adjusts those rights from the console. When rights are taken away, their open sessions can be ended in the same gesture.

Acceptable use

What a community may and may not upload to Savoir is said in the acceptable use policy, which is part of these terms. A per-member usage limit exists so that the service stays available to everybody; it is invisible in normal use.

The plans, the trial and payment

Savoir is sold by plan, by the size of the community and never by the number of questions. The four plans and their prices are on the pricing page.

• The prices shown are placeholders, to be confirmed before launch. They are in US dollars.
• The trial runs fourteen days and asks for no credit card.
• A member counts when they are active or invited. When a plan's cap is reached, new invitations are refused; questions are never counted and never blocked.
• The plan is chosen when the community is created, and it is changed by writing to us.
• Payment and invoicing go through the platform that hosts Savoir. Their terms are to be confirmed before launch.

Availability

The state of the service — the database, sign-in, the answering engine and document processing — is measured every five minutes and published on the status page, with ninety days of history.

No availability rate is promised in this version of the document. A figure, if there is to be one, will be written here before launch.

Suspension and ending

Savoir may suspend an account or a community that departs from the acceptable use policy, having written to you first where the circumstances allow it.

A community may leave at any time:

• an administrator downloads the whole archive from the console — one file holding the data of every table and the current file of every document;
• the community is then closed, and what it holds is erased thirty days later;
• a deleted document stops being read and stops being cited from the moment it is deleted.

What these terms do not say yet

The limits of liability, the warranties and the way disputes are settled are the clauses a lawyer has to write before launch. In the meantime, what is true is simple: the service is provided as it is, its answers are extracts of the documents the community itself uploaded, and the community remains responsible for its own decisions.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law applicable in Québec, and the courts of Québec are the ones that hear them.

Changes

When these terms change, the date at the top of this page changes with them, and the version in force is the one published here. Substantial changes are announced in the changelog.

Writing to us

Any question about these terms is asked through the contact form.