Open Foris Arena – Ownership of Custom Surveys and Data Confidentiality

Dear ASSEDEV team,
Thank you for your interest in Open Foris Arena, and for the clear questions.
Please find our answers below.

1. Ownership of customized surveys

Yes. The surveys, forms, categories (code lists), taxonomies and processing chains you create remain yours. Open Foris does not claim any rights over them.
In practice:

• Each survey has an owner (shown in the My Surveys list), and its Survey Administrator(s) fully control it. Ownership can be transferred to another user if needed.
• At any time you can export the survey (structure only, or structure plus data as a full backup) as a .zip file from Dashboard -> Export (Handbook §6.3). You can re-import that file into Arena or into your own Arena installation.
• Only a Survey Administrator can unpublish or delete a survey (Handbook §6.4). Deleting removes both the structure and the data from the database.

Note that the Arena software itself is open source under the MIT License. The license covers the application code, not the content you create with it.

2. Ownership and confidentiality of collected data

The data collected through your surveys belongs to your organization. Access is controlled by you:

• A survey and its data are only visible to users you invite to it. Each invited user gets a role (Survey Administrator, Survey Editor, Data Analyst, Data Cleanser, Data Editor, Guest), and each role has specific permissions (Handbook §11.1–11.2). Other Arena users cannot see or access your survey.
• In Dashboard -> Edit info -> Security (§6.1.5) you can decide whether data entry users may see records created by other users.
• User Groups with qualifiers (§11.3) let you restrict a group of users to a subset of the data, for example a region.
• The record workflow (Entry -> Cleansing -> Analysis) and the activity log let you trace who changed what and when.

On the hosted service at openforis-arena.org, data is stored on secured cloud servers (Amazon Web Services). For maintenance and technical support, a small number of Open Foris system administrators have technical access to the platform. They do not use, share or analyse survey data, and access happens only when needed to operate the service or when you ask for support.

If your organization needs full control over where data is stored and who administers the server, you can install Arena on your own server or locally with Docker. See Annex 7 – Installing Open Foris Arena on a Custom Server in the Handbook.

3. Applicable documentation

• Arena Handbook, in particular Annex 8 – Privacy Policy, plus chapters 6 (Dashboard/Security/Export), 11 (User roles) and Annex 7 (self-hosting)
• Arena Legal Disclaimer, also linked from the Help menu in Arena. It references FAO's data protection and privacy notice.
• Source code and MIT License

We hope this clarifies things. Feel free to follow up if your institutional framework needs anything more specific.

Best regards,
The Open Foris Arena team