COAST provides standard contract templates to support digital teams in delivering a successful outcome using agile, open source and collaborative working.
To achieve our aim, the COAST project works to the following principles:
- Fair & Balanced: The contracts will be worded so that no party is favoured over another. This will help get negotiations out of the way more quickly so projects can get started, and will set the right tone for collaborative working.
- Support delivery of a successful outcome: Most contracts simply set out what work will be done for how much money, and then are mostly concerned with transferring the (appearance of) risk and handling the blame and fallout for if anything goes wrong. The COAST templates will focus more on agreeing the ways of working that will lead to a successful outcome, and the transparent and collaborative management of risks.
- As simple as possible, but not simpler: As far as possible, while remaining legally sensible, the contracts will be written in a plain, easy to understand form of English. We want to avoid un-necessary clauses, and overly long clauses - but at the same time we must make sure that reasonable provisions are in place to protect both parties, and support the successful outcome of the project.
The target use of COAST is for enterprise & public sector clients, and small to medium size digital agencies. The project budgets for users of COAST templates are likely to be >£50k and <£1m.
Other contract templates exist that are more suitable for SME clients, freelancers or micro-size agencies, or projects with smaller budgets. Similarly, projects with budgets over £1m are more likely to need custom contracts.
The templates are written in Asciidoc format. Our Asciidoc help page explains what this is and to use it.
COAST has a standard clause library, allowing the reuse of clauses across contracts, with central updating of these as necessary.
Contract templates are then assembled by including these standard clauses, as well as any contract specific clauses.
The Asciidoc format allows for automatic numbering of all the clauses in the finished contract templates.
There are two ways to use the COAST templates, depending on your level of technical comfort:
COMING SOON We will provide downloadable Microsoft Word files of the compiled templates. You can download these, and then use find & replace to customise them for your needs.
You can install asciidoc, clone this repository to your local machine, and then have the ability to generate new contracts yourself from the template files. This means that you can simply change some variables in the contract template and then generate Word or PDF files of the completed contract. Instructions on how to do this are coming soon.
An example contract template (which you can view the compiled output of) demonstrates how the templates are built.
Work is currently underway to produce:
- A Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
- A framework contract for digital projects
- A Statement Of Work template for use under the framework
- A Partner agreement for agencies that choose to work together
- A Freelance/Contractor agreement for engaging individuals on a team
The work can be followed in the 'Projects' and 'Issues' tabs of this Github repository. Please open tickets here on Github with ideas and contributions. Also on Github you can 'Watch' and 'Star' this project near the top right of the page.
Our help section includes details of How To Contribute.
This is a project from Convivio, led by Steve Parks.
IMPORTANT: By providing these templates we make no claim to legal expertise and are not legal advisors. We provide absolutely no warranty of any kind and accept no liability. You should obtain legal advice before using them.
COAST by Convivio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://github.com/ConvivioTeam/coast.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://github.com/ConvivioTeam/coast.
