Welcome! This is a community-created knowledge base about data security and data protection. The goal of this project is to provide comprehensive, accessible and relevant information that helps people, organizations and companies to better understand and comply with laws like the GDPR.
Currently, the project contains the following components:
- The GDPR law texts in various formats, including HTML, PDF and YAML. We want to make it easy for people to use these texts in their projects and therefore provide annotated, machine-readable versions that can be easily processed.
- Technical articles and guidelines that describe specific requirements of the GDPR and how to implement them in practice.
- Summaries of all relevant articles.
- A glossary explaining technical terms.
This is a community portal, so please contribute and help us to make it better! When contributing, please follow this process:
- Download and sign the appropriate contributor license agreement for individuals or entities (e.g. companies, organizations). Send the signed agreement (together with your Github username) to us via e-mail and we'll send you back a version signed by us. The agreement will remain confidential, we will add your Github username to our public list of contributors though to make it easy to verify future contributions by you. Please note that we are not able to accept any contribution from you before you sign the agreement as it creates risk not only for us but for all people and organizations that might use original content from this project.
- For larger contributions (e.g. new articles) please first open a Github issue and write a short proposal, so that the community can provide feedback before you get started. This will ensure that your contribution really adds value and has a high probability of making it into the portal.
- For smaller edits and improvements you can directly do the work and open a pull request when you're done.
- Start working on your improvement. Ideally, you will create a fork of this project and create a new branch in that fork where you perform your work.
- When you're done with your improvement (or when you want some feedback on an initial version), you open a pull request where you describe what you did (ideally linking back to the Github issue you created). If you just want to get some feedback but your work is not yet finished, you can add a "WIP" prefix to the title of your pull request to indicate this.
- The community will provide feedback and help you to finalize your improvement.
- When all open questions and the collected feedback is addressed, we merge your improvement into the master branch and publish it on our portal.
The following sections discuss specific types of materials on this portal that you can contribute to.
Wiki pages are a great place to collect relevant information about an article, definition, topic or recital. Currently we do not have a fixed structure for this as we still try to figure out what's the best format, so please feel free to structure you content as you see fit and submit it for discussion early and often.
To create a new Wiki page for an article, go to the relevant source directory
(e.g. src/en/gdpr/chapters/1/sections/0/articles) and create a file calles
[article-number]-wiki.md (e.g. 1-wiki.md). The content of the file will
be picked up during the generation of the site and added to the corresponding
article.
An article summary should help people to quickly grasp the essence of the article without being overwhelmed by legalese. Summaries should be short (obviously) and be writen in an accessible language. Feel free to make use of bullet lists and emphasis (e.g. bold text) but try to keep it simple.
To create a new summary page for an article, go to the relevant source directory
(e.g. src/en/gdpr/chapters/1/sections/0/articles) and create a file calles
[article-number]-summary.md (e.g. 1-summary.md). The content of the file will
be picked up during the generation of the site and added to the corresponding
article.
The following Github users/organizations are verified contributors that have signed the contributor license agreement:
- adewes
The HTML contents of this project are built using the static website builder. To build the website and documents, you will need to install the following pre-requisites:
- Python 3
- Node-Sass
On Ubuntu, you can install all requirements with a single command:
make setup
To download and install PrinceXML, follow the instructions on their website.
After installing all the pre-requisites, you can run the following command to build the website and launch a local development webserver:
make watch
To re-generate the law texts from their raw source (which should normally never be necessary), run the following command:
make law-texts
The knowledge base consists of original resources (i.e. text, code or images created by verified contributors of this project) as well as third-party resources (e.g. European law texts, images and code). Here, the term resource includes but is not limited to texts, images, code and any other assets that are provided as part of this project.
All original resources that are not software code (see below for that) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which allows commercial and non-commercial use of the resources. The full text of the license can be viewed on the linked website and is included with this project in German and English. If you use original resources from this project you need to attribute them to this project in the following way:
- For printed materials (e.g. flyers, books, brochures, ...), you need to include the title and a link to the knowledge base (https://kiprotect/kb for the English version and https://kiprotect/de/wissen for the German version) in your title page or first page. The information has to be placed prominently and needs to include a notice about the original license as stated in the CC-BY-SA license terms.
- For online content you need to include the title and a link to the GDPR community portal (https://kiprotect/kb for the English version and https://kiprotect/de/wissen for the German version) on each page that contains resources from this project. You may not use any rel attributes on your links.
Please note that the license agreement does not extend to third-party resources, so please carefully read the section below before you re-use any third-party resources from this project.
Original software code published as part of this project is released under a BSD 3 Clause License.
If you want to use original resources from the GDPR community portal in a way that is not allowed by the CC BY-SA license, please contact us and describe your use case. We might be able to grant you a custom license then if you make sure that any added value will be contributed back to this project.
The following third-party resources have been used to build this community portal:
- Beam-Up: A MIT-licensed static website builder
- Bulma.io: A MIT-licensed Flexbox CSS framework
- Preact.js: A MIT-licensed frontend library
- Futuro Icons by Bloomicon: A commercial icon package (7scientists GmbH acquired a license for using the icons on the KIProtect websites(s). If you want to re-use the icons for other purposes than this project you will need to buy a license yourself)
- Logos: Creative Commons, Octicon
- Law texts: European Laws from EUR-Lex
We take intellectual property rights very serious. If you think that any material on this project may infringe on your copyright or the copyright of a third party, please contact us or open an issue.
If you have questions regarding this project here's how to get answers:
- If your question could be of interest to other people as well please create an issue in our issue tracker, as this will allow the community to help you and will make the answer accessible to other people that might have the same question.
- If you want to ask a question but do not want to do so publicly, feel free to send us an e-mail to kb@kiprotect.com
This project is maintained by KIProtect GmbH (https://kiprotect.com).