As an initiative of City of Houston (COH) / Design Thinking and Innovation (DT&I), the Design for Houston (DfH) challenge event is aimed to bring design mindset among citizens. The best rule of thumb is that teams should not illegally exploit others' intellectual property, and that in turn, everything we create becomes part of the public domain. Participants agree by their participation in this event that they will hold no-one liable for any loss or damage. Here are some specifics about the rules:

1. All results are owned by the individual design team
2. All services, ideas, art, code and concepts made during the Design for Houston are owned by the members of the team that developed them (not the organizers). This includes all aspects of intellectual property, such as patents, trademarks, designs and copyright. In the cooperative spirit of a designing together, there are often many people helping one another. All members of the team are held to standard industry practices of collaboration, including appropriate acknowledgements to parties (also in other teams) who may have contributed. The design team is free to develop their ideas commercially after the event, but the results of the event itself must be open, as below.
3. All results have to be published and archived on the Design for Houston (www.designforhouston.org) website and related social media sites under Creative Commons license
4. All participants of the Design for Houston challenge will allow the documentation of their service to be archived on the DfH shared drives in the form it was submitted at the end of the jam and final presentations. Participants may ask to have an update of the documents posted with notice of version information. 
All works will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).
5. For your work on Design for Houston, DT&I recommends avoiding the use of pre-made content (this includes graphic designs, processes, models, audio, program code, etc.) unless it was publicly available at the time of usage. Please also make sure that if you use pre-made content, you use content with an appropriate license (CC or public license).
6. All materials can be used for demonstration: All materials made at the Design for Houston challenge event can be used for demonstration and lecture at conferences, schools or industry venues with the expressed discretion of the Design Thinking and Innovation (www.dt-i.org) group.