Owned for public benefit

The legal form is the commitment

My Words is owned by C2 Discovery Labs CIC, a community interest company. That is a deliberate structure rather than a description of intent, and it carries obligations that an ordinary limited company does not.

1. An asset lock. The assets, including this product, cannot be sold out of the company for private benefit. If the company is ever wound up, what it holds transfers to another asset-locked body with similar purposes, not to shareholders.
2. A community interest test. The company has to satisfy the CIC Regulator that it is carrying on its activities for the benefit of the community, and file an annual report saying what it did.
3. Surplus is reinvested. Any surplus goes back into the purpose: building the product, extending the languages, and doing the research that shows whether it works.

This is why the application moved. It was built as a proof of concept inside a commercial company, and moving it into the CIC put it somewhere it could not simply be sold, at the point where it started to matter to the services using it. The research page covers where it came from.

People

Everyone who works on My Words is paid above the National Living Wage. Nobody working on this product is on an unpaid internship, and the postgraduate research collaborations being arranged are academic placements with a supervisor and an output, not free labor.

Environment

The technical footprint is small where we control it and unmeasured where we do not, and the detail is on its own page: environmental footprint.

How we behave commercially

1. No lock-in. Every plan is rolling month to month with no minimum term, no notice period and no exit fee. A service stays because the tool earns it.
2. The limits are published. The safeguards page sits with the product explanation and is linked from the footer of every page, not buried in the terms of service, and it is written to be handed to staff as it stands.
3. No invented evidence. We do not quote accuracy percentages, savings figures or outcome claims that nobody has measured. Where the academic validation produces results that go against us, they get published with the method attached.
4. We will argue against a bad business case. We are not sales focused. If My Words is a poor fit for what you are trying to do, we will tell you that, and we would rather lose the sale than have the tool used where it should not be.

If you are procuring this, social value covers what we can evidence against the Social Value Act, and environmental footprint covers the technical side. If something your policy needs is not on any of them, ask for it.