Conditions of participation

Who this applies to

These conditions apply to everyone who registers for, applies to or attends FacMed Hack #1 or any event announced on this site, on site or online: participants, mentors, jury members, partners and guests.

Registering, applying or turning up means accepting these conditions and the code of conduct below. For members of the University of Geneva they sit alongside the University’s own regulations, which continue to apply and take precedence where the two ever differ.

Places, applications and exclusion

Places are limited, and the number is stated on each event. Where an event asks for applications, the organising team reads them and decides.

The organisers may decline an application, withdraw a place already granted, or ask somebody to leave an event. They are not obliged to give reasons, and their decision is final. In practice such a decision is almost always about capacity, about keeping a workable balance of clinical, technical and methodological profiles in the room, or about the code of conduct below.

A place is not an entitlement and confers no right to compensation. If your application is declined or your place is withdrawn, the organisers do not reimburse travel, accommodation or any other cost you may have committed to.

Taking part beforehand does not count against you

Contributing to the needs library, coming to a needs sprint, attending a learning session or joining any preparatory event neither guarantees a place at the hackathon nor rules one out. They are open on their own terms, and they are the best way to arrive already knowing who you want to work with.

Needs submitted to the library are shaped into challenges by the organising team, sometimes well away from their original wording. Submitting a need gives you no special claim over the challenge that comes out of it, and no obligation to work on it. Where a challenge is recognisably somebody’s contribution, we credit them.

Data you are given stays with whoever gave it to you

Some of the work runs on data that clinical and research teams, or the Campus Biotech scientific platforms, make available to the teams. Unless they say otherwise in writing, that data remains the exclusive property of the team providing it or of its institution. Taking part in the hackathon gives you none of it.

What you are given is a right of use — limited, and for the time being: to read the data, analyse it and draw results from it, for the purpose announced with the challenge and no other, for the duration of the hackathon and its immediate follow-up. It does not include the right to reproduce or copy it outside the environment provided, to re-use it for any other purpose — another study, another project, a commercial use — or to publish or circulate it, in whole or in part, in any form.

The hackathon is a research environment and follows the rules of one: UNIGE’s institutional policy on research data management (directive 0320) and its personal-data protection policy (directive 0339), the conditions of the scientific platforms the data comes from (directive 0370), and the applicable law — in particular LIPAD and, for anything falling under human research, the Human Research Act and the approval of the competent ethics committee.

Taking part means entering that environment. Everyone admitted — including people from outside UNIGE — is treated, for the duration of the event and its follow-up, as part of the University’s research environment, and undertakes to follow the same rules as a member of it. By accepting these conditions you undertake to keep confidential any non-public data you are given access to here, with no time limit.

Some datasets ask for more: a separate confidentiality undertaking, training beforehand, an agreement between institutions, or a specific analysis environment that nothing leaves. Where that is the case you are told before you are given access, and access depends on it.

• Nothing leaves the analysis environment you were pointed at: no copy onto a personal machine, no upload to a storage service or a private code repository, no sending it to a third-party service — an online AI assistant included — without the provider’s written agreement. Pasting an extract into an online tool is a transfer to a third party, even when it does not feel like one.
• Never attempt to re-identify anyone from pseudonymised data, and report any accidental re-identification immediately.
• At the end of the hackathon, delete the working copies you made and keep only what the provider has expressly allowed you to keep.
• What you show at the final presentations, and what you publish afterwards, is agreed in advance with the team that provided the data. Those presentations are public and filmed: a figure that must not leave the room must not go on the screen.
• Credit the platform and the team that provided the data in everything that follows — the presentation, the repository, the grant application, the paper — in the form they ask for.
• If you are at all unsure what you may do with a dataset, ask first rather than afterwards.

What the teams build is shared

Two things that must not be confused: what you are handed, and what you make. Data made available stays with whoever provided it, as above. What the team builds from it — the work, not the material — is shared.

Everything produced during the hackathon — code, notebooks, analysis pipelines, figures, slides, project outlines — is shared at the end of the event with everyone who took part, through the channel the organisers announce on the day.

Shared among participants is not the same as published. The default is that the cohort sees it and the world does not. A team may of course decide to go further and publish its work openly, and we encourage it — an open licence on the repository is the simplest way.

Sharing is a licence, not a transfer. You keep authorship, and whatever rights your institution’s rules give you. What you grant the other participants and the organisers is permission to read, use, adapt and build on the work for the purposes of this hackathon and the research that follows from it — including in a grant application, with proper credit to its authors.

That licence covers only what the team produced. It never extends to data provided by others, or to anything from which that data could be reconstructed: a team cannot share what is not its own. Strip the source data out before you put anything into the shared space.

• Bring nothing you cannot share: no confidential material, no unpublished data you do not control, no third-party code under a licence that forbids it. What you bring, you bring on the same terms as what you are given.
• Patient and clinical data are never brought to the hackathon. Teams work with the platform datasets provided, or with synthetic and openly licensed data. Anything else needs an approved protocol and the organisers’ written agreement, arranged before the event and not during it.
• If your team needs access to something restricted, ask the organisers in advance. It is usually arrangeable, and never arrangeable at two in the morning.
• Credit each other. Teams formed here often continue into a proposal, and the authorship conversation is easier had early than argued later.

Photographs, video and recordings

Photographs, video and recordings are made at these events — to document them, to report to the partners and funders who make them possible, and to announce the next one. By attending, you accept that you may appear in them, and that they may be used by UNIGE and its partners in reporting, on this site and in communications about the hackathon.

You can say no, and it costs you nothing. Tick the box on the registration form, or tell any organiser on the day, and we give you a coloured sticker at the welcome desk to wear visibly on your clothing. It is how we spot the shots you appear in and set them aside before anything is published. If an image of you is already out there and you would rather it were not, write to us and we will remove it.

The final presentations are public and may be filmed or streamed in full. If you would rather not be recorded while presenting, tell the organisers before your slot and we will arrange it.

How images are handled, on what legal basis and for how long, is set out in the privacy notice.

Taking part is at your own initiative

Participants take part on their own responsibility. Each participant is responsible for their own insurance cover — health, accident and third-party liability — and for their own belongings. The organisers, UNIGE and the venue are not liable for loss, theft or damage, save where the law says otherwise.

Bring your own laptop. Unless an event says so explicitly, travel, accommodation and meals outside the ones provided are at your own cost.

Changes and cancellation

The programme, the venue and the dates may change, and an event may be cancelled — for too few registrations, for reasons outside our control, or because a room becomes unavailable. Changes are published on this site and sent to the address you registered with, as early as we know about them.

Where an event is cancelled, that notice is the extent of what the organisers owe. Costs you had already committed to are not reimbursed.

Data protection

What we collect, why, who sees it and how long we keep it is set out in full in the privacy notice, which forms part of these conditions.

Applicable law

These conditions are governed by Swiss law. The University of Geneva is a public institution of the Canton of Geneva, and the courts of Geneva have jurisdiction, subject to any mandatory rule of law that says otherwise.