Knowledge Hub Terms and Conditions

Welcome to the Knowledge Hub (our site). Please read these Terms & Conditions carefully before using our site.

These terms of use, together with the documents referred to herein, inform you of how you may use our Knowledge Hub (Police Digital Service KH) (“our site”) as a registered User. Use of our site includes accessing, browsing, or registering to use our site. 

The Knowledge Hub is a free-to-join, UK-hosted community platform based on open source and open standards portal technology. It supports collaboration, professional social networking and sharing of ideas and information across the public sector, public administration and those working in or with public service improvement.

We maintain our site as a service to all of our Users. Use of our site indicates acceptance of the terms of use set out herein. If you do not agree to these terms, you cannot use our site. 

For the purposes of these terms of use:

(a)    "Information" means the information made available on our site; 
(b)    “We/us/our” means the Police Digital Service, a company incorporated in England and Wales with company number 08113293 and whose registered office is at 20 Gresham Street Gresham Street, London, England, EC2V 7JE;
(c)    "User" means the person or entity to whom a licence has been granted to access and use the Information; and
(d)    ‘’You’’ means the person, whether or not a representative of a company or organisation, at whose request is granted access to our site under licence on these terms.

Other Applicable Terms

These terms of use refer to the following additional terms, which also apply to your use of our site:

•    Our Privacy Policy, which sets out the terms on how we process any personal data collected from or about you. 
•    Our Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out the permitted uses and prohibited uses of our site. When using our site, you must comply with this Acceptable Use Policy.
•    Our Cookie Policy, which sets out information about the cookies on your site.

Changes to these Terms

We may revise these terms of use at any time by amendment and it will be your responsibility to check from time to time to take notice of any changes we make, as they are binding on you. 

Changes to Our Site

The content on this site may change at any time. However, please note that any of the content on our site may be out of date at any given time, and we are under no obligation to update it.

We do not guarantee that our site, or any content on it, will be free from errors or omissions.

Accessing Our Site

By registering to use our site, we grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-assignable, non-sublicenceable licence to use our site, through a generally available web browser, mobile device or authorised application (but not through scraping, spidering, crawling or other technology or software used to access data without our express written consent), subject to these terms.

Access to, and the use of, some parts of our site (including content) may be restricted to Registered Users or selected Registered Users only  (e.g. owners or administrators of groups or networks to control access to their groups or networks) and you may require their prior approval to join certain groups.

We may, at our sole discretion, refuse to register a User or to limit access to all or part of our site to certain Users, or terminate the membership of a Registered User without providing reasons for doing so.

We reserve the right to intervene to temporarily support groups that are not being actively facilitated.

Availability of Our Site

We will use reasonable endeavours to ensure that our site is accessible 24 hours per day on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We give no warranties or guarantees that our site will meet particular levels of availability or functionality.

Therefore, we strongly recommend that you do not post any business critical information or material on our site and that you keep copies of all information and content you post on our site and must also be in accordance with your employer's policies and processes.

We reserve the right from time to time, and at any time, to modify our site (or any part thereof) with or without prior notice and You agree that we shall not be liable to You or to any third party as a result of our modification of our site.

We expect to provide updates to our site, and to perform routine maintenance from time to time. These may involve a small period of time where our site is unavailable. Site announcements will be communicated by us as far as it is possible to do so.

In the event of unscheduled or emergency maintenance for security or any other reason, our site may be unavailable for a period of time with no advance warning.

We may establish general practices and limits concerning the use of our site, including the amount of disk space, activity, bandwidth, or any other resource available (including Helpdesk availability) in order to preserve the functionality of our site and its availability to other Users.

We shall be entitled to subcontract the performance of all or part of our site and its support activities in order to comply with our obligations under these terms.

Your Account and Password

If you choose, or you are provided with, a User identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential. You must not disclose it to any third party.

The profile that you create when you become a Registered User will become a part of our site and, apart from the information that you licence to us, is owned by us.  However, as between you and other Users, it belongs to you. You agree that you will:

  • keep your password secure and confidential;
  • not allow anyone else to use your account;
  • not use anyone else's account;
  • not sell, trade or transfer your account to anyone else; and
  • not charge anyone for access to or the use of any part of our site or content on it.

You are responsible for anything that happens on or through your account until you either close it down, or prove to us that your account's security was compromised for reasons that were not your fault.

We have the right to disable any User identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of use.

If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your User identification code or password, you must promptly notify us on our Support Email

If you are using our site on behalf of a public authority, a company or any other legal entity you are bound by these terms, even if that organisation has its own separate agreement with us.

Intellectual Property Rights

Our site is protected by intellectual property rights and this section sets out the intellectual property rights that we have in our site and the extent to which these may be reused by you. An integral feature of our site is that content may be posted onto the site by individual Users. As a result, since we have not created all the content on our site, we do not own all the intellectual property rights of every aspect of the content.

“User Content” means all information, data, text, software, photographs, messages or other materials submitted, posted or displayed by you and other Users on our site.

The submitter of User Content retains all intellectual property rights in it and is responsible for protecting those rights.

We claim no ownership or control over any User Content, however we reserve the right to refuse to accept, post or transmit any User Content we choose.

All material on our site other than User Content is owned by us and as a result, the copyright and all other intellectual property rights (including all database rights, trade marks, text, graphics, code and links) belong to us.  Those materials are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved.

If you decide to print off copies and/or download extracts of any page(s) from our site, you must:

  • not modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded in any way;
  • not use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text;
  • acknowledge our status (or, in the case of User Content, the status of any identified contributors) as the authors of content on our site; 
  • not use any part of the content on our site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or, in the case of User Content, the relevant User(s); and
  • treat the paper and/or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded as confidential, unless you have obtained consent from us or, in the case of User Content, the content owner or the Group Facilitator(s) to disclose such copies to a third party.

If you print off, copy or download any part of our site in breach of these terms of use, your right to use our site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.

Reliance on Information

The content on our site is provided for general information only.

Although we make reasonable efforts to update the information on our site, we make no representations, warranties or guarantees, whether express or implied, that the content on our site is accurate, complete or up-to-date.

Limitation of Our Liability

Nothing in these terms of use excludes or limits our liability for any liability that cannot be excluded or limited by English law.

To the extent permitted by law, we exclude all conditions, warranties, representations or other terms that may apply to our site or any content on it, whether express or implied. 

We will not be liable to any user for any loss or damage, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, even if foreseeable, arising under or in connection with:

  • use of, or inability to use, our site; or
  • use of or reliance on any content displayed on our site. 

If you are a business user, please note that in particular, we will not be liable for:

  • loss of profits, sales, business, or revenue;
  • business interruption or continuity;
  • loss of anticipated savings;
  • loss of business opportunity, goodwill or reputation; or
  • any indirect or consequential loss or damage.

We will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a virus, distributed denial-of-service attack, or other technologically harmful material that may infect your computer equipment, computer programs, data or other proprietary material due to your use of our site or to your downloading of any content on it, or on any website linked to it.

We assume no responsibility for the content of websites linked on our site. Such links should not be interpreted as endorsement by us of those linked websites. We will not be liable for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them.
 

Uploading Content to Our Site

Whenever you make use of a feature that allows you to upload content to our site, or to make contact with other users of our site, you must comply with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.

You warrant that any such contribution does comply with those standards, and you will be liable to us and indemnify us for any breach of that warranty. 

We will not be responsible, or liable to any third party, for the content or accuracy of any content posted by you or any other User of our site.

The views expressed by Users on our site do not represent our views or values.

Monitoring

By using our site, you accept that, you will be able to access content posted by other Registered Users in an unedited and unrestricted form. We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor the use of our site. Administrators of Groups may also monitor your use of that community. We will not be responsible as author, editor or publisher of any content.

We reserve the right to promptly, without notice to you, edit, reject or remove any content on our site without any liability on our part. Administrators of Groups may also do this where the Content is posted in the community they manage.

If you encounter any content or behaviour in connection with the use of our site which you think is unacceptable you should flag it as inappropriate. We will then review the content or behaviour and decide whether it complies with these terms and those set out in the Acceptable Use Policy and we will deal with it at our discretion.

Where we consider it appropriate, we (or the Administrator of the applicable Group) will endeavour to contact you to inform you that a complaint has been received in relation to Content which you have uploaded, the action that we have taken, our evaluation of the allegation, and what steps (if any) we require you to take.

Viruses

We do not guarantee that our site will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.

You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programmes and platform in order to access our site. You should use your own virus protection software.

You must not misuse our site by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our site, the server on which our site is stored or any server, computer or database connected to our site. You must not attack our site via a denial-of-service or other attack or a distributed denial-of-service or other attack. By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use our site will cease immediately.

Linking to Our Site

You may link to our home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it.

You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists.

You must not establish a link to our site in any website that is not owned by you.

Our site must not be framed on any other site, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page.

We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

The website in which you are linking must comply in all respects with the content standards set out in our Acceptable Use Policy.

If you wish to make any use of content on our site other than that set out above, please raise a ticket  via email.
Support Email

Where our site contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only.

We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources.

Applicable Law

These terms of use, their subject matter and formation are governed by English law. You and we both agree to that the courts of England and Wales will have non-exclusive jurisdiction. 

Except where expressly provided to the contrary, these terms and conditions are not intended to be for the benefit of, and shall not be enforceable by any person who is not a party to them, under of the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 or otherwise and neither party can declare itself a trustee of the rights under it for the benefit of any third party.

Contact Us

Support Email