Terms of Service

Last updated: 2 September 2026

Agreement to these terms

Hallway is a directory of technology conferences and their calls for papers (CFPs), together with tools that help organisers run those events and help speakers and attendees take part. Hallway is a product of Venn Labs LLC ("Hallway", "we", "us", or "our"), and is an independent, commercial service.

By accessing or using Hallway ("the Service"), you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Your use of the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy, our Acceptable Use Policy, our Cookie Policy, and - where you use the Service as an organiser - our Data Processing Addendum, which are incorporated into these terms by reference.

Submitting a CFP (call for papers) response hosted on Hallway is a direct acceptance of these terms by the person who submits it. As with comparable CFP platforms, you agree to these terms when you send us your submission, whether or not you have claimed an account.

The Service

Hallway has two sides. For organisers it works like a CRM for planning an event and coordinating the people involved in it: organisers can list and manage events, invite and coordinate speakers, collect responses through forms, and record travel and logistics. For individuals it is also an optional social platform.

Hallway lets anyone browse a public directory of conferences and CFPs for free, and lets conferences be listed for free. The social capabilities - posting, using chats and direct messages, creating organisations or events, following people or events, and extending a public profile of your own - require you to claim an account by verifying an email address. Until you claim, you do not have these capabilities.

A profile and portal may exist for you before you claim anything, because an organiser added or imported you. In that case you can use a magic login link to reach your own portal - your itinerary and the organiser forms sent to you - without claiming an account and without gaining any of the social capabilities above. Claiming an account unlocks the social side; using a magic link does not.

Some directory listings are compiled from public sources - conferences' own published web pages read by our documented crawler, and public speaker profiles imported by organisers. Every such listing is reviewed by a person before it appears, and any listing can be corrected or removed on request (see "Your content and other people's data" and our Privacy Policy).

Accounts

You must be old enough to form a binding contract and to consent to our processing of your data under your local law (at least 16 in many places).
You must provide accurate account information and keep it up to date.
You are responsible for activity that happens under your account and for keeping your sign-in method secure. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.
A profile may exist for you before you create an account, because an organiser added or imported you as a speaker. You can claim that profile by verifying an email associated with it, or ask us to correct or remove it - see our Privacy Policy.

Acceptable use

You agree not to misuse the Service. In particular, you must not use it to break the law, infringe others' rights, transmit malware or spam, harass or impersonate anyone, scrape or harvest data without permission, or interfere with the Service's operation or security. Our Acceptable Use Policy sets out the full rules and forms part of these terms.

Organiser responsibilities

If you use the Service as an organiser, you take on additional responsibilities, because you enter and handle data about other people - your speakers and respondents:

You warrant that you have a lawful basis and any necessary permission to add, import, or store data about third parties (including their contact details, biographies, and travel and logistics information), and to ask them the questions your forms contain.
You are responsible for the accuracy of the event and personal data you enter, and for keeping it up to date and correcting or deleting it on request.
You must comply with all data protection and privacy laws that apply to you, and act as the controller of the personal data you collect through the Service for your event, using Hallway as a tool to process it. Our Data Processing Addendum governs how we process that participant data on your behalf as your processor.
You must use data you gather or export through the Service only in connection with the event or event series for which it was provided - including future editions of the same event or series that you run, for example inviting a past speaker to respond to next year's CFP - and not for unrelated marketing or resale.

You are responsible for how you use the Service, and you agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your breach of these responsibilities, to the extent permitted by law.

Your content and other people's data

You keep ownership of the content you submit (your profile, talks, form answers, and posts). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, and display that content as needed to operate and promote the Service - for example showing your public speaker profile in the directory. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies we must retain for legal reasons or in routine backups for a limited period (no more than 30 days).

If you believe content on Hallway infringes your rights, misuses your personal data, or should not be listed, contact us at hello@hallway.events. We honour removal and correction requests for personal data and directory listings, as described in our Privacy Policy and on our about the bot page.

Our intellectual property

The Service itself - its software, design, and branding, but not user content or third-party data we credit - is owned by us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual property laws. We license open datasets we build on under their own terms and credit them on our data sources page. Nothing in these terms transfers our intellectual property to you.

Fees and free access

Browsing the directory and being listed in it are free, and core speaker and organiser features are currently offered at no charge. We may in future introduce paid plans or features, change what is included in any free tier, or change our pricing. We will give reasonable notice of material changes that affect features you rely on. Nothing in these terms is a promise that any feature will remain free forever.

Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that directory information (much of which is compiled from third-party public sources) is complete, accurate, or current. You rely on the Service at your own risk. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any warranty or right that cannot be excluded or limited under the laws of your jurisdiction, including any statutory consumer guarantees.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, or goodwill, arising out of or relating to your use of the Service.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these terms is limited to the greater of the total fees you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD 100. This limitation applies regardless of the form of action.

This cap does not apply to our obligations under applicable data protection laws. Our responsibilities for the personal data we process - including those in our Data Processing Addendum - are not reduced by the limitation above.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you; in that case our liability is limited to the smallest extent permitted by law.

Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if required to protect the Service or other users, or if we stop offering the Service. On termination, your right to use the Service ends; sections that by their nature should survive (including content licence terms for retained copies, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and governing law) continue to apply.

If we discontinue the Service, or terminate an organiser's account other than for a serious breach or a legal or security requirement, we will give organisers at least 30 days notice where practicable so they can retrieve their data. Organisers can request an export of their event data in a machine-readable format at any time, not only at termination; a self-serve export from the organiser dashboard is a planned feature. Participant data we hold as processor is then deleted in line with our Data Processing Addendum.

Data protection and security

Where you use the Service as an organiser, we process the participant data you enter as your processor under our Data Processing Addendum, which sets out our security measures, our use of sub-processors, and our commitment to notify you of a security incident affecting your data without undue delay, and in any event within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Our own use of personal data as a controller is described in our Privacy Policy.

Some free-text you submit through a CFP or similar form may be sent to a third-party language model provider (Anthropic) to detect and mask personal data so that reviewers can assess submissions blind. This happens only when the event's organiser has switched it on in their CFP settings - it is off by default, and when it is off an on-server scanner runs instead and no submission text leaves Hallway. The specific model version is operational detail and is not named on these legal pages. This text is processed on our instructions and is not used to train the provider's models.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we make a material change that affects organisers or reduces your rights, we will give at least 30 days advance notice, by email or through the Service, before the change takes effect. For other changes we will update the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, notify you through the Service. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the revised terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. The state and federal courts located in the State of Missouri will have jurisdiction over any dispute, except where your local consumer law gives you the right to bring proceedings elsewhere.

Contact us

Questions about these terms can be sent to hello@hallway.events.