Your privacy.

Who handles your information

Bulawayo Commons is an independent community initiative. Its organising team manages the information submitted through this website. Use the request form below to contact us about your data.

What we collect

Membership applications include your name, WhatsApp number, and the part of Bulawayo where you live or grew up. You can also choose to provide an email, GitHub profile, affiliation, your motivation for contributing, and PDF résumé. We record your contact consent and when you gave it.

Research proposals include a question, approach, expected outcome, and optional team details and supporting links. Project ideas, research proposals, and privacy requests include your name, reply details, message, consent, and submission time. Please share a neighbourhood, not your home address.

To limit spam, the server derives a daily identifier from the connecting IP address and records it with submissions. Our hosting providers may also keep technical logs for security and operation.

How we use it

We use applications to coordinate membership, ideas to consider community projects, research proposals to discuss possible studies, and privacy requests to respond to you. Contact permission is specific to the form you submit. An idea, research proposal, or privacy request does not subscribe you to general community messages.

We don’t sell applications, contact details, or résumés. They are not part of the public contributor directory.

Blog and member sign-in

Approved writers sign in using a one-time email code. We store a hashed code briefly, limited sign-in attempt records, and a hashed session token that expires after eight hours. A secure cookie keeps the writer signed in. The selected colour theme is saved on your device.

Blog drafts and uploaded images are stored for the writing team. Publishing makes the article, its author name, and referenced images public. Unpublishing removes it from the public blog but does not remove copies already saved elsewhere. Email drafts, recipient addresses, and sending results are private to the approved writing team.

Readers can comment on articles, with their name or anonymously. The comment is public as soon as it is shared, and the email address we ask for stays private with the writing team. We may hide comments that attack people, share private details or are spam. Views and likes are counted with a scrambled identifier derived from the connecting IP address, so we don’t store who the reader is. Your browser remembers which articles you liked. You can ask us to remove a comment using the form below.

When you share an email on any form here, we add it to our mailing list for occasional updates about the Commons, and the form says so. Every update carries an unsubscribe link, and once you unsubscribe we do not add you back, even if you fill in another form.

Public contributor profiles

With your permission, we may publish an agreed display name, GitHub link, short bio, and contribution details. Public profiles may be indexed by search engines once the site is public. Your phone number, application, neighbourhood, email, and résumé are never automatically copied into a profile.

Ask us to correct or remove a profile at any time. Removing it here does not automatically remove copies held by search engines or work you published on GitHub.

Where information is stored

We use OpenAI Sites for hosting and Cloudflare for database and file storage. When email sending is connected, Brevo processes sign-in codes and messages sent by the writing team. Access is limited to authorised organisers and the providers needed to operate the service. Provider systems may process data outside your location.

Project photographs are hosted with this website. Fonts load from Google Fonts, which receives normal connection information when your browser requests its files. Links to GitHub, Google Street View, and other external sites follow those services’ own privacy rules.

We have not added advertising trackers or behavioural analytics. The hosting platform may use cookies for sign-in, access control, and security.

How long we keep it

We keep membership information while coordinating your involvement, and ideas and research proposals while they are being considered or developed. We keep privacy requests long enough to handle them and document the outcome. Records are not currently deleted on an automatic schedule; the team reviews and removes information that is no longer needed.

You can ask for deletion or withdraw contact permission using the form below. We may retain limited information where needed to resolve a dispute, prevent abuse, or meet a legal obligation.

You’re in control

Ask to see, correct, or delete your information; remove a public profile; or stop communications. We may ask you to confirm you control the contact details or profile concerned. We won’t ask for a password.