Community Guidelines and Policies

Who we are

ROI Connect is an online platform specifically intended for engaging civic participation and community development throughout rural Ontario. The website is created and maintained by the Rural Ontario Institute. The tool serves to offer connectivity and voice to community members working on issues and projects important to their community. It provides a unique space for dialogue, collaboration, networking, mobilization, and consultative feedback where individual voice can be added to the collective whole to help inform and shape projects, activities and policies. Its very purpose is to provide a safe, respectful and inclusive online space for meaningful dialogue and consultative feedback mechanisms.

 

Abuse of the website in the form of hateful content, deceitful or unlawful agent interaction, unsolicited economic activity, spamming, mining or any malicious interaction or dialogue will not be tolerated. Inappropriate use of the site will result in account termination. User accounts, content and projects can be deleted, suspended, removed or blocked at any time, under the discretion of ROI and website administrators. Data storage on the platform is secured on Canadian servers and participation agreements are required for community project leaders to foster healthy relationships when engaging in their communities via the platform.

 

Our website address is: https://www.roiconnect.ca. For more information about using the website or entering into a partnership agreement please contact info@ruralontarioinstitute.ca.

 

More infoBecome a Partner

General Site Use

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included as location data in images is visible on the Internet.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Data Sharing

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email received by roiconnect administrative staff.

Data retention

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website, personal information provided is stored in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Your data rights

If you have an account with roiconnect, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where your data goes

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Visitor interaction with the site may also be logged for analytic measurement using third party applications like Google Analytics.

Group Site Use

Profile Data

When you register for the site, you may be asked to provide certain personal data for display on your profile. The “Name” field is required as well as public, and user profiles are visible to any site visitor. Other profile information may be required or optional, as configured by the site administrator.

User information provided during account registration can be modified or removed on the Profile > Edit panel. In most cases, users also have control over who is able to view a particular piece of profile content, limiting visibility on a field-by-field basis to friends, logged-in users, or administrators only. Site administrators can read and edit all profile data for all users.

Activity

This site records certain user actions, in the form of “activity” data. Activity includes updates and comments posted directly to activity streams, as well as descriptions of other actions performed while using the site, such as new friendships, newly joined groups, and profile updates.

The content of activity items obey the same privacy rules as the contexts in which the activity items are created. For example, activity updates created in a user’s profile is publicly visible, while activity items generated in a private group are visible only to members of that group. Site administrators can view all activity items, regardless of context.

Activity items may be deleted at any time by users who created them. Site administrators can edit all activity items.

Messages

The content of private messages is visible only to the sender and the recipients of the message. With the exception of site administrators, who can read all private messages, private message content is never visible to other users or site visitors. Site administrators may delete the content of any message.

Cookies

We use a cookie to show success and failure messages to logged-in users, in response to certain actions, like joining a group. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted immediately after the next page load.

We use cookies on group, member, and activity directories to keep track of a user’s browsing preferences. These preferences include the last-selected values of the sort and filter dropdowns, as well as pagination information. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted after 24 hours.

When a logged-in user creates a new group, we use a number of cookies to keep track of the group creation process. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted either upon the successful creation of the group or after 24 hours.

Event Registration

Event, Venue, and Organizer Information

If you create, submit, import, save, or publish Event, Venue, or Organizer information, such information is retained in the local database:

  1. Venue information: name, address, city, country, state, postal code, phone, website, geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude)
  2. Organizer information: name, phone, website, email
  3. Event information: website, cost, description, date, time, image
Importing Events, Venues, and Organizers:
  1. All data present within a CSV or ICS file and external URLs (for events, venues, organizers, and tickets)
  2. Import origin data (URL from where events are being imported—such as Eventbrite, MeetUp, other compatible URL sources, and more, which can include similar or same data as listed above)
  3. Eventbrite Ticket information: name, description, cost, type, quantity

Please note that to create new events through the Community Events submission form, a user must hold a website account on this domain. This information is retained in the local database. It is also possible to create events anonymously, if the site owner has this option enabled.

When purchasing Eventbrite Tickets, attendee, purchaser, and order information are stored and managed by Eventbrite.

API Keys

We make use of certain APIs, in order to provide specific features.

These APIs may include the following third party services: Google Maps (API key), Meetup (OAuth token), PayPal (email, Client ID, Client Secret), Eventbrite (API key, auth URL, Client Secret), and Zoom (email, Client ID, Client Secret).

Data Retention

All information (data) is retained in the local database indefinitely, unless otherwise deleted.

Certain data may be exported or removed upon users’ requests via the existing Exporter or Eraser. Please note, however, that several “edge cases” exist in which we are unable to perfect the gathering and export of all data for your end users. We suggest running a search in your local database, as well as within the WordPress Dashboard, in order to identify all data collected and stored for your specific user requests.

Your Data

Some third party applications like Eventbrite, Google Maps, or PayPal, may pass user information to these external services in order to process event information to locations where these applications are based, which could include abroad.