Founding Beta Terms
Effective date: On publication for the founding beta
Version: Draft v2.1
Last updated: August 30, 2026
Status: Draft (pending legal review)
Steppe is ad-free civic infrastructure in development for Redmond and Central Oregon. Steppe has a signed fiscal-sponsorship agreement with Ignite Empowerment Foundation. Ignite handles sponsor-routed grants, donations, and other sponsored responsibilities. Gregory Chism operates the member app, handles member data, and will administer member subscriptions directly. Either Gregory Chism or Ignite may handle a particular contract; every contract or enrollment flow must identify its actual party before the user agrees.
These terms govern the founding beta. They do not claim that Steppe has already formed the planned Oregon public benefit nonprofit or that the draft Articles and Charter have been filed or adopted.
1. Beta Participation and Verification
The founding beta is free and intended for verified adult residents of Central Oregon, beginning with Redmond. Steppe will first run a readiness test capped at 50 people. It will advance only if at least 25 people participate and at least one local-organization collaboration produces current, real-time local information in the service. If both gates pass, the founding launch is capped at 250 members and is free for six months. Gregory Chism is the support contact and incident owner for both stages.
Paid membership is planned afterward at a flat $4 per month with a no-questions hardship waiver, but no payment will be collected until final paid-membership terms identify the contracting party, payment provider, price, renewal method, cancellation, and applicable consumer notices.
A human reviewer is intended to check proof of residency once collection opens. Collection remains closed until deletion after review and orphan cleanup are verified end to end. The intended retained record is only the verification result, date, and method, not the identity document or legal name. Members use a chosen display name with one another. One account is allowed per member.
2. Community Standards
The following legal and safety floor is not subject to a member vote:
- illegal goods or services;
- child sexual abuse material;
- non-consensual intimate imagery;
- credible threats of violence; and
- human trafficking or exploitation.
Community norms above that floor are intended to be member-governed through the governance process and the amendable Schedule of Defaults.
3. Moderation and Messages
Moderation is report-driven. A member reports content, a human reviews it, and a consequential moderation action is recorded and may be appealed. Steppe does not promise proactive monitoring, scanning, or filtering.
Direct messages are readable in the app only by their participants; moderators and administrators have no message-reader interface. Messages are stored as plaintext protected by access controls rather than end-to-end encryption, so a database operator can technically access them even though ordinary policy and tooling prohibit routine access. A participant may voluntarily disclose a quoted excerpt in a safety report.
4. Exchange
Steppe hosts member listings for needs, offers, goods, jobs, mutual aid, and events. It does not process, hold, or escrow exchange payments. Transactions are off-platform arrangements between members. Steppe is not a party to those transactions and does not warrant a listing, member, item, or service.
5. Member Content
You keep ownership of content you author and grant only the license needed to store and display it through the service. Export tools provide the account data the app can associate with you.
When you delete your account, Steppe deletes messages you authored, removes empty threads, and removes or scrubs ordinary account data. Content another member authored remains theirs. A quoted excerpt another participant voluntarily included in a safety report may remain as that report's intake record.
6. Governance
The beta applies the rule set recorded in Steppe's dated governance outcome resolution:
- ordinary proposals require a weighted simple majority;
- major proposals require 15% participation and 60% approval;
- foundational proposals require 15% participation, 75% approval, and at least 30 days between publication and voting opening;
- abstentions count toward participation but not the weighted yes/no approval percentage; and
- no proposal is binding below the five-ballot privacy floor.
The eligible-member count and rule set are snapshotted when a proposal is created. The founding cohort may ratify or amend these beta defaults prospectively.
App governance during beta is a product/operating process. It is not represented as a legally sufficient corporate-member vote until the planned entity exists and counsel confirms compliance with Oregon written-ballot and quorum rules.
7. Privacy and Legal Process
The Privacy Policy explains data roles and retention. In short: residency-proof collection remains closed until cleanup is verified; Gregory Chism handles member data; Ignite has no routine membership-database access; and complete export, account deletion, message cleanup, and session revocation are beta launch gates rather than claims of current production readiness.
Steppe may preserve a specific record subject to valid legal process or a legal hold. It also preserves minimized consent, closed-ballot, moderation, appeal, and audit records when deletion would make the accountability record inaccurate.
8. Acceptable Use and Account Action
Do not break the law; abuse, harass, endanger, or impersonate neighbors; evade verification or moderation; scrape member data; overload the service; or attack its security. Steppe may suspend access for violations of the legal floor or the then-current community rules, subject to the documented appeal process where it applies. You may leave at any time.
9. Beta Service and Liability
The beta is experimental and may change, pause, or lose data. It is provided “as is” to the fullest extent applicable law permits. Nothing here waives rights or liability that Oregon law does not allow a party to waive.
10. Changes
Steppe will post revised terms with a new effective date and provide advance notice of material changes where required. Privacy or governance behavior will not be advertised before the product can actually perform it.
11. Contact
Questions can be sent to hello@steppe.community or by mail to 3566 NW 8th Street, Redmond, OR 97756.