Bracket: acceptable use

One page. It sits under terms-of-use.md and says the same things in the negative, because people remember a short list of don'ts.

Names

Do not write down the name of an individual delegate. Not in a note, not in a quotation, not in a meeting title, not in the access note, not in chat. Write the Party, the group or the role: "the EU", "the Arab Group", "the Co-facilitator". This is the one rule with no exceptions in it, and terms-of-use.md §6 says why.

Do not copy a negotiator's name out of the Bulletin or any other document Bracket holds into a note, a spreadsheet or chat. Cite the document; write the Party. Citing a published author by name is academic practice and is fine.

Do not name a chair or a co-facilitator either. A chair is a role and a Party: "Co-facilitator, Norway". There is no field for a person's name anywhere in Bracket and there is not going to be one.

Do not work around the hint. When Bracket says quietly that what you have typed looks like a name, it is right often enough to be worth the two seconds. Reword the note.

Do not attribute a quotation to a named individual from Bracket notes: not in a paper, not in a blog post, not on social media, not in a conference talk. Quote the delegation, the coalition or the body. If an individual attribution is genuinely necessary for a piece of work, it needs a public source for the quotation, and a field note is not one.

The data

Do not take notes out of the team. No forwarding a note, an export or a report to somebody outside the project: not a colleague at your institution, not a journalist, not an NGO you also work for, not a delegation you are friendly with. Your own notes downloaded for your own reading are still team data. If a co-author or a supervisor needs access, ask the owner, who can add them or run a proper export with a record of it.

Do not report live from a closed or restricted room. Nothing from an informal informal goes into a tweet, a WhatsApp group outside the team, or a public "what is happening in the room" thread while the meeting is running. This is the fastest way to lose the team's access for everybody.

Do not try to work out who a label belongs to in a pseudonymised dataset, and do not combine an export with attendance lists, photographs or social media to work out who a pseudonym is.

Do not use another researcher's notes as though they were yours, and do not ask an administrator to get you somebody's notes. They cannot, and asking puts them in an awkward place.

The corpus

These rules are the project's own undertaking, applied to each of us: Bracket is an instrument and never a product, access to it is never sold, and its sources are never redistributed without permission (README.md in this folder, "Rights, and the non-commercial undertaking").

Do not use the document corpus commercially. No consultancy deliverables, no paid products, no training a model you or anyone else sells. The UNFCCC's terms grant the documents for personal, non-commercial use, and the collection we built from them inherits that limit. See source-materials.md.

Do not redistribute the corpus outside the team as a bundle, a database or a download, and do not put it behind a public interface. A single document cited in a paper, with its symbol, is normal scholarly practice and is fine.

Do not alter a source document. The text in the library is what the secretariat published. If an extraction looks wrong, report it rather than editing round it; our annotations are a separate layer and stay separate.

The tool

Do not share your account or your password, and do not let somebody else take notes signed in as you.

Do not fetch from UNFCCC systems yourself with the project's scripts or your own. Collection is slow, deliberate and run from one place, and a burst of requests can get the project blocked.

Do not put research findings in chat, and do not expect it to last: chat is deleted twelve months after the conference closes and is never part of a research export. Nor credentials, nor anything you would not say with the whole team listening.

Do not record audio or video, and do not photograph delegates. No exceptions, and no third-party app doing it alongside Bracket.

Do not connect other tools to Bracket: no scraping, no automated clients, and no copying notes or the dataset into a service outside the project. That includes AI assistants: pasting a note into one is sending research data to a third party, whoever runs it.

If something goes wrong

Tell the owner. A note in the wrong place, a device left on a train, a message sent to the wrong group: the first hour is worth more than a tidy account afterwards. Nobody is in trouble for reporting quickly.

Serious or repeated breaches mean access is withdrawn. Where a researcher's own institution has a research misconduct procedure, it is theirs to apply; this project has no disciplinary power over anybody and does not pretend to.

Contact: contact@bracketresearch.org.