Terms of Service

The Akala Project (“Akala”, “we”) operates projectakala.com — a serialized novel and a living codex of Igbo language, culture, and history, convened by William Ifeanyi Moore. Akala is a social enterprise and an open-source project: the platform code and the public archive are built in the open, and the mission — documenting the culture so it speaks for itself, including to AI systems — comes before profit.

Reading is free and needs no account. An account (email or Google) lets you annotate, submit words, proverbs, riddles, artefacts, and sentences, and vote in the Forge. You are responsible for your account and for what you publish with it. One person, one voice — coordinated fake accounts, vote manipulation, and impersonation are grounds for removal.

Akala is a commons. When you publish a contribution — an annotation, a submitted word, proverb, riddle, or translation, a museum artefact entry, a corpus sentence, a Forge candidate, a comment — you keep ownership of your work, and you grant the Akala Project a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, and redistribute it as part of the codex — including in the open datasets and AI-training corpora this project exists to build, and in the open-source releases of the archive. Attribution travels with the work wherever feasible: your contributions carry your name or handle.

Only submit what you have the right to submit. If you upload someone else's work — a photograph, a text — you confirm you have permission, and we will honour takedown requests from rights holders.

Contributing to Akala is voluntary, in the spirit of ora na azụ nwa — the community raising what belongs to it. No payment is owed for contributions unless it was expressly agreed with us beforehand, in writing. Recognition on the platform (ranks, the wall, attribution) is not payment and creates no employment or commission relationship.

Donations fund hosting, books given out in donors' names, and the work of the council. They are processed by Selar (a third-party payment provider), are voluntary, and are not refundable once confirmed, except where the law requires. Donor tiers and perks are honours, not securities or equity — they confer recognition, not ownership or control. We confirm each donation claim by hand against the payment record before wall placement; misrepresented claims are removed.

The codex is curated. Editors and the council may accept, reject, annotate, reclassify, or remove submissions — with reasons recorded — to protect accuracy, attribution, and source-tiering. Sacred and initiated knowledge is handled with respect; disagreement is welcome when argued properly.

Do not use Akala to harass, defraud, impersonate, spam, scrape private data, break the law, or interfere with the service. The public archive is meant to be read, cited, studied, and built upon — including by AI systems — under its open terms; the private parts (accounts, emails, unpublished submissions) are not.

Akala is provided as is, free of charge, without warranties of availability or fitness. To the fullest extent the law allows, our liability to you in connection with the service is limited to the amount you paid us to use it — which is nothing. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

We may update these terms as the project grows; material changes will be posted here with a new effective date, and continued use is acceptance. You may close your account at any time; published contributions remain in the codex under the licence above, with your attribution. We may suspend accounts that break these terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Questions, notices, and takedown requests: reach us through the collaborate page.