Point-at-Issue Intake Form¶
Intake template — instantiates Dispute-Question Alignment
A single front-door form that captures the contested claims in each party's own words and attaches a provisional question-type label before any argument begins.
The Point-at-Issue Intake Form is the lightweight, one-artifact way into the archetype — the form a dispute fills out at the door before anyone convenes a room or builds a grid. Its whole ambition is minimal and front-loaded: capture what is actually being contested, in the words of the people contesting it, and pin a first-pass question-type label on each item, all in a single pass a submitter can complete alone. It is deliberately not the map — it is the raw material the map is built from. Its defining discipline is verbatim-first, label-second: the form insists on each party's own phrasing of the dispute before it offers a menu of question types, so the neutralizing act of classification never quietly erases how the parties themselves see the fight. The label it attaches is explicitly provisional — a routing guess, not a ruling — and everything downstream is licensed to overturn it.
Example¶
An open-source project uses an intake form as the first field on its issue tracker for contested reports — the ones where a maintainer and a reporter clearly disagree. A reporter files: "The library silently drops Unicode characters — this is a critical data-loss bug." The form makes them do three things. First, restate the contested claims in the smallest answerable form: (a) the library removes certain characters from input; (b) this removal is unintended behavior; © it is severe enough to warrant a fix. Second, record the maintainer's own words alongside: "It normalizes per the documented Unicode profile — this is specified behavior, not a bug." Third, tag each claim with a provisional type: (a) is fact (does the removal happen?), (b) is definition (does documented-but-surprising behavior count as a "bug"?), © is quality/policy (is it worth prioritizing?).
Filling the form takes four minutes and decides nothing. But it has already surfaced that the real disagreement is the definitional claim (b) — the parties don't dispute that characters are dropped, they dispute whether documented behavior can be a bug — and it hands the maintainers a triaged item, in both voices, ready to route to a fuller mechanism if the definitional question won't yield to a quick reply.
How it works¶
- Verbatim before menu. The form's first fields demand each party's own phrasing of the dispute; the question-type menu appears only afterward, so classification never precedes capture.
- Decompose to answerable claims. The submitter is required to split a headline grievance into separately answerable claims, each on its own line.
- Provisional label per claim. A short checklist offers the question types; the submitter picks a best-guess type, explicitly marked as revisable.
- Route on the label. A closing field asks what should happen next — quick reply, workshop, escalation — turning the form into a triage decision, not an archive.
Tuning parameters¶
- Field rigidity — free text versus forced decomposition and a fixed type checklist. More structure yields cleaner, comparable intakes but deters casual submitters and can force ill-fitting labels.
- Self-serve vs. assisted — filled by the submitter alone or with an intake officer. Assisted intake produces better first labels but costs staff time and reintroduces a framer's bias.
- Label commitment — how strongly the provisional label binds downstream. Treating it as sticky speeds routing but risks locking in a first-pass guess; treating it as disposable keeps it honest but wastes the triage.
- Verbatim slots — how many parties' words the form captures. One voice is fast; capturing every side is fairer but slows a front-door instrument meant to be quick.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is throughput and fairness at scale: it is the only mechanism here a single person can complete unaided, so it lets an organization apply stasis discipline to a flood of disputes rather than only the few that merit a workshop. By forcing verbatim capture before labeling, it also blunts the front-door version of framing capture — the intake officer who "translates" a grievance into their own preferred question type.
Its failure mode is the seductiveness of the provisional label. A first-pass guess, printed on a form, hardens into a settled fact as the item travels — the archetype's wrong-stasis lock-in, arriving early and quietly. This is where the party who controls the form controls the frame: a leading type menu or a biased template quietly steers what the dispute is allowed to be about, a mundane instance of the mobilization of bias that any agenda-setting device carries.[n1] The guarding discipline is to stamp the label as provisional in a way downstream mechanisms actually honor, to keep each party's verbatim words traveling with the claim so the framing can be re-examined, and to audit the form's own type menu for slant.
How it implements the components¶
The intake form is the archetype's front-door capture instrument — a thin subset, filled fast:
contested_claim_set— its core output: the headline grievance decomposed into separately answerable claims, one per line.stakeholder_language_sample— captured first, in verbatim slots, before any classification touches the dispute.current_stasis_label— a provisional, explicitly revisable question-type tag per claim, used to route rather than to rule.
It does not sequence dependencies among questions (see Stasis Mapping Workshop), bind evidence and burden to each type (Burden and Standard Alignment Table), or resolve which forum has authority (Jurisdictional Stasis Routing Check).
Related¶
- Instantiates: Dispute-Question Alignment — the intake form is the lightweight front door that supplies the raw claim set and first labels.
- Sibling mechanisms: Stasis Mapping Workshop · Fact-Definition-Quality-Policy Matrix · Cross-Stasis Dialogue Protocol · Burden and Standard Alignment Table · Jurisdictional Stasis Routing Check · Stasis Review Memo · Formal Decidability Probe
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Interface, Display & Cue
Rationale: The mechanism is a single user-facing form that elicits verbatim claims, answerable decomposition, provisional labels, and a requested next route.
Nearest alternative: Decision, Gate & Allocation — The label can route a submission, but the concrete deployed form is the intake affordance that captures and structures it.
Review outcome: Adjudicated after independent review; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Law & Governance
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Issue intake and the separation of contested claims descend from legal pleading, dispute framing, and procedural case management.
Related originating lineages:
- Rhetoric — Rhetoric materially shapes the question-type and argument-framing layer used before substantive dispute.
Review resolution: Both blind reviewers agree that law governance is the primary origin. Reconciliation resolves alternate origin disagreement, origin mode disagreement, domain reach disagreement. Formative alternate lineages are retained as rhetoric; later breadth of use is recorded separately as domain_reach=multi_domain, while origin_mode=cross_disciplinary_synthesis describes the relationship among origin lineages.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; medium confidence.
Notes¶
The intake form is intentionally the cheapest mechanism in the set, and that is a feature: because it decides nothing and only routes, it can be applied indiscriminately to every contested item without the cost or risk of premature closure. Its output feeds directly into the Stasis Mapping Workshop or Fact-Definition-Quality-Policy Matrix, which is where actual alignment work begins.
[n1] The idea that whoever defines the alternatives shapes the outcome is the mobilization of bias described by political scientist E. E. Schattschneider: agenda-setting is not neutral because organizing some conflicts into a process organizes others out of it. An intake form is a small agenda-setting device, and its type menu carries the same latent power. ↩