Helpful Guidelines on Structuring and Presenting Ideas

 

If you haven’t already read the section ‘Personality of the Site’ please do so. In summary, the personality of the site is described by these adjectives:


Balanced, Impartial, Considered, Rigorous, Factual, Pragmatic, Intelligent, Fair, Friendly, Respectful, Supportive, Positive, Encouraging


These guidelines are set in this context of achieving that personality. The guidelines won’t all be applicable for all ideas. They do however provide a useful checklist of things to consider when trying to create a balanced proposal The more you can incorporate the more they will help ensure the quality of the site and also give a consistency to the structure of ideas from different authors, which will be helpful to the reader.


Developing more complex and more contentious ideas may require several iterations to address comments and to add your further thinking, additional facts and further research. However, we want to encourage you to capture your ideas early on, so the idea of several iterations is important (see the section on ‘Stages of Idea Development’). In this way it won’t be a huge task and you will hopefully get an early sense of achievement early on.


Please do however include the level of your document as part of the title to aid those commenting in understanding where you are at. Please indicate whether the Idea is an ‘Embryonic Idea’; First Draft, Second Draft etc.; Draft Proposal; or Formal Considered Proposal by including it as part of the Title e.g. Idea on xyz – Embryonic.  


If you have comments on the Structure Guidelines then as for any element of the site please use the Support and Feedback forum to comment and suggest improvements.


Questions and Assumptions


In early versions of your idea, do feel free to include questions on things you don’t know, or facts you don’t have to get the help of other members to contribute to development of the idea. Think of other members as friends who are helping you develop the idea. Just clearly label any question with the word Question:


Similarly do recognise when you are making assumptions and label them with the word Assumption:, so that others can contribute if they know of facts which will support the assumption.


Guidelines for structuring


Depending on the nature of the Idea, if it is addressing a specific Issue you may want to describe the Issue first, unless it is described in the Top 10 Issues of our time, in which case you can just cross-reference it. There are Guidelines for describing the Issue as well as the Idea/s below.

 

Please note that to structure a document in this way is quite a significant task, so don't worry too much in your first version of an Issue or Idea, just get the Issue or Idea captured in a balanced way.


Issue Structure

  • Description of Issue
  • Why is this an issue?
  • Are there any secondary issues?
  • Who, Where, When?
    • Who is affected by the issue?
    • Are there location, demographic or timing considerations?
  • Alternative Views
    • Are there others who will see this not as an issue but as something positive, if so why?

 

Idea/s structure

  • Title of Idea 
  • Link to issue if previously defined elsewhere
  • Summary of Proposition
  • Detailed Description of Proposition
    • Include details of timescale in which the proposition needs to apply e.g. is it long term or short term
    • Goals of proposition
    • Detail of Proposition
      • Include any alternative ideas within the proposition where it perhaps consists of a number of things which might contribute
  • Assumptions - either include under this heading or identify within text
  • Pros and Cons of Proposition
    • Separately draw out each in turn. In particular it is important to recognise and Cons and address these
  • Conclusions
    Why are you reaching conclusion that this is on balance a good idea?
    • Logical view
    • Emotional view
    • Pragmatic view

Looking at your proposition and the pros and cons from these three perspectives can help in analysing your idea/s, making it more rigorous and deciding on the relative importance of each perspective in drawing conclusions and decision making.

  • Vested Interests
    • Are there vested interests that would either want this to succeed or want to see it fail?
  • Unintended Consequences
    • Can you foresee any possible unintended consequences?
  • Other information and research
    • Are there any useful references to this issue and/or groups looking at this issue?
    • Are there any areas that ought to be research? Anything we can learn from other parts of the world?
  • Questions – are there any questions that you would like to ask other members help with, if you haven’t already included them in the body of the text?


Don’t be limited by the above, use additional headings as you see fit.