Editing ideas in Dialogue

Occasionally someone may get in touch to ask you to edit the idea they have submitted to a Dialogue challenge, this may be because they have made a typo or want to correct what they have said.

It's possible in Dialogue to edit ideas if you are a site administrator, and we'll step through how to do that here. Later in this article are some things to think about around the ability to edit ideas and making it clear what you will and won't edit.

How

You first need to find the idea which needs changing, there are a couple of ways to do this but it really helps if your participant can give you their username, the title of their idea, and which challenge it's submitted to:

Search by the username of the person who wants their idea edited

1. Once logged in as an admin, head to 'Users' in the top of your screen.
2. Search for the username of your respondent and select it (or select it directly if you can already see it in the list).
3. This will bring up all the ideas they have submitted to your site, select the one they want edited.
4. You'll then be in the admin side of that idea which now allows you to edit it (as well as moderate it, add topics, and add your own comment to it if you wish).

Search through the ideas of the challenge it's in

If your respondent doesn't recall their username but can tell you the challenge name and the title of their idea, you can search for it via the challenge dashboard:

1. Head to the dashboard of the challenge.
2. You'll see the number of ideas submitted to the challenge towards the centre of the page e.g. 2 ideas and x comments - select the number of ideas to be taken to the full list of them
3. From here you can scroll through until you see their idea, or you can search for key words in the title using the field at the top right of the page
4. Once you have found it, select the idea and you'll then be in the admin side of that idea which now allows you to edit it (as well as moderate it, add topics, and add your own comment to it if you wish)

What next?

Once you've selected 'Edit idea' you'll be taken to the Edit idea screen, here you can edit an idea on behalf of your participant, for example to fix a typo or to redact personal information. If you are making a major change to the idea it's recommended that you include a note explaining what was changed and when.

Once you have finished making the requested changes, you can save the idea and this will update it.

Some things to think about

We strongly recommend that you only edit ideas at the request of your participants and keep a hold of the request from them for your own auditing purposes.

The integrity of your challenge relies on the trustworthiness of the process, so it may be worth making clear some rules around when you will or won't edit ideas i.e. that you will only change them at the request of a participant or to ensure people's personal info isn't put in public.

You can even put these guidelines in your dedicated 'Moderation Policy' page, so that they are publicly visible.