Setup platform rules / DUA system

[tschaffter]

Background: In (DREAM) Challenges organized using Synapse, participants are required to accept the challenge / platform rules and Data User Agreement. Now the implementation of this process has not foreseen that rules may change over the course of the challenge. As a consequence, when it's absolutely required to have the participants accept rule changes, what has been done in the past by some organizers was to unregister all participants and ask them to go through the registration process again where they were asked to accept the new rules.

I assume that the NLP Sandbox rules may change over time and most likely, that new DUA will put in place as we connect the platform to more Data Site. This is to be expected for continuous benchmarking projects. Note that this issue is being considered in the design of the new Sage challenge platform.

Proposal

Meanwhile, I want to identify a workaround to this for the NLP Sandbox. What about having the following Teams in Synapse:

• Registered Users: list of users who have registered to the NLP Sandbox.
• Valid Users: list of users who have accepted the latest version of the platform rules / DUA

SOP:

1. When a Synapse user register to the NLP Sandbox, he is requested to accept the latest rules. Upon accepting them, he is added to the Teams "Registered Users" and "Valid Users".
2. The NLP Sandbox Team changes the rules / DUA. An admin runs a command to empty the Team "Valid Users". The Team "Registered Users" is left untouched.
3. A message is displayed on the NLP Sandbox home page to announce that the rules have been updated and describe how to accept the new rules. Ideally there is a button that the user can click to accept the new rules. The approach adopted should be friendly for both new users and users who have registered in the past and must now accept the new rules. Upon accepting the rules, the user is added to the Team "Valid Users".

Notes:

• Access to restricted files and ability to make a submission is contingent to being in the team "Valid Users".

@thomasyu888 Does that sounds like a simple workaround to put in place? How would the submission on behalf of a team be affected by this approach?

[thomasyu888]

I think this is a simple enough workaround with how Synapse works now. The only "issue" will be that only submitter on the team has to accept the new terms of use. The reason being, submissions actually have a "contributors" field, if you are not a valid contributor: https://rest-docs.synapse.org/rest/org/sagebionetworks/evaluation/model/Submission.html

1. Has a submission with another team
2. Not registered for the challenge

You will not be added to the contributor list. Since we only actually pull the "submitterid", there have been times where members were added to the Synapse team but only the submitter was actually registered and accepted terms of use to the challenge. There are two issues I see here:

1. Synapse does not have a way for people to agree to new terms of use if new terms are put in place
2. You can submit as a team as long as you yourself are eligible to submit (We don't really use the contributor field to view all the people that are eligible from the team).

[tschaffter]

Great!

The only "issue" will be that only submitter on the team has to accept the new terms of use.

This is OK. I'll make sure that this behavior is documented clearly.

[tschaffter]

I did the following:

• The team "NLP Sandbox Participants" is now NLP Sandbox Users
• The team NLP Sandbox Active Users has been created

[tschaffter]

@thomasyu888 Let's go ahead with this solution