Editorial Policy

Solution Exchange provides an impartial platform for sharing, building, and disseminating knowledge in a peer-to-peer framework.  Solution Exchange communities are successful because of the knowledge shared and effort put in by members to share knowledge for the larger public good.  It is thus necessary to enforce an editorial policy to enable the strengthening of these efforts, and to prevent the degeneration of the platform by accidental or wilful abuse.

The focus of Solution Exchange activities is India.  All knowledge building should be useful for the Indian development context.

Members share knowledge through two primary methods:

• Participation in discussions
• Sharing documents

A.    Participation in Discussions

Some of the contribution types that we will not accept as responses to discussions:

• Criticism for the sake of criticism - that does not lead to learnings.
• Criticism that is destructive, malicious, or inappropriate (derogatory, defamatory, offensive, threatening, depicts violence, invasive of another’s privacy, obscene or sexually explicit).
• Content that is not related to the subject of the discussion
• Promotion of commercial goods
• Promotion of individuals or institutions
• Description of projects/ programmes/ institutions that do not have any learnings or lessons
• Queries/ content not related to the themes covered by the community
• Content that has been authored by people other than the respondent
• Content that violates any copyright

We are happy to accept the following types of contributions as responses to discussions:

• Experiences of the member
• Examples
• Recommendation of documents (text, audio, video) related to the subject of the discussion
• Commentary/ critique based on research/ experiences/ examples
• Constructive criticism with lessons

We encourage members to share their experiences or others’ examples.  We discourage opinions or advice that is not backed by experience, example, or research.

B.    Sharing Documents

Some of the document types that we will not accept:

• Not linked to the themes covered by the communities
• Violation of Copyright, plagiarism
• News stories
• Promotional material of institutions and individuals, annual reports, etc
• Opinion pieces not based on research, or experience
• Confidential reports

We are happy to accept the following types of documents:

• Training manuals, handbooks, guidebooks
• Research reports, working papers, discussion papers, conference papers
• Case studies
• Evaluation reports, review reports, monitoring reports
• Government documents – policies, briefs, acts, guidelines, orders, etc