The DCAF/ISSAT Learn section hosts blogs from a number of organisations. If your organisation produces blogs with SSR content or interest and you would like to have these included in the CoP, please get in touch via contact@issat.dcaf.ch.
The ISSAT Blog contains regular entries from ISSAT staff, ISSAT Roster members and guest contributors. ISSAT welcomes blog submissions from other SSR practitioners to its own ISSAT Blog page. These should follow the guidelines below and can be submitted via contact@issat.dcaf.ch.
Blog topics
In general, the content of blog-posts should highlight examples of where the international community, and in particular donors, are supporting SSR according to international good practice, or how they might do so more effectively. Specific blog topics can include:
- Opinions regarding SSR in practice;
- Comment on current events in relation to SSR;
- Comment on recent publications or statements by organizations and individuals related to the field of SSR.
Submission
All blog-posts hosted on the ISSAT Blog page should be submitted to the Advocacy & Outreach Coordinator via contact@issat.dcaf.ch for approval. The blog submission will be reviewed for editing, content and style.
Blog-post submissions should follow the following criteria:
Content
- An ISSAT blog-post tends to be an opinion piece which provides a nugget of insight, usually on SSR principles and practice, and a learning take-away that provides inspiration, or that others can reflect on or make practical use of;
- Please be mindful that what you say will reflect on you as an individual, on your organisation if you are employed AND on ISSAT;
- Exercise discretion when positing content that might be considered sensitive;
- Do not use false evidence or treat assumptions as facts. If you are writing about your own assumptions or theory on an issue, please make this explicit;
- Do not directly accuse individuals or organisations. While critical evaluations of an issue are welcome, please try to approach posts in a problem-solving and partnership forging manner.
Structure
- Demonstrate one single coherent and concise concept with quality prose and grammar:
- Try to make no more than three or four main points;
- Try to keep your sentences and paragraphs concise;
- Try to keep your submission to one side of A4.
Tips on structure:
- If you’re having difficulty marshalling your ideas around one single concept, try asking a simple open question, such as ‘how can SSR turn the challenge of corruption/political indolence/risk aversion into an opportunity?’, and then providing the answer. This is often a good way of crystalising the point of what you want to convey.
- If you’re blog is tending to run on or lose its thread, then ensure your paragraphs are short, by cutting them into sub-paragraphs of four of five lines only, then ask yourself what the point is of each paragraph. If there is no point to it, then see if you can discard it, and use the resulting list of points to ensure the coherency of your argument.
Style
- A blog is more chatty in style than a formal report (if you’re having difficulty avoiding a formal style, try writing it as a draft email, explaining your issue to somebody who is a good acquaintance);
- They are usually linked to an event. Thus it might start ‘I was recently on mission in … when I was reminded of …’, ‘The events in … yesterday/last week/last month illustrate…’;
- ISSAT adheres to the Oxford Style Manual, and other blogs already posted on the ISSAT Blog page will give you an idea of ISSAT house-style in practice.
Uploading your blog
It is important that the author submits their own blog post, so that the post appears under your name on the Blog page.
- Register or login on the DCAF/ISSAT website - top right of any of our web pages (this needs approval, plus additional account-rights to upload to the ISSAT Blog page)
- Navigate to the ISSAT Blog page
- Click <Add Blog Post> in the orange banner at the bottom of the page to take you to the blog-post loading page
- Paste in the blog-post title and main body into the appropriate fields
- You can insert links in the text if you to point readers to relevant documents or information. To hyperlink to an external website or a PDF document, highlight the word or text you wish to link, and click the “Insert/edit link” tab on the right side of the top tool bar (on the right of the “Undo” and “Redo” buttons). Paste the link in the space underneath “Other”.
- To add a hyperlink to an internal link (on the ISSAT website), or PDF documents you may have uploaded to the CoP, click on the “Insert/edit link” tab, open the drop down menu by clicking on “Other”, and choose “eznode”. Click the magnifying glass and enter a keyword to search for the document or page. Once you select the document or page, click OK.
- If you are using endnotes and wish to link them internally within the text using anchors, please contact contact@issat.dcaf.ch for support.
- You can highlight text or quotes in the Main Body by adding a textbox using the Custom Tag button (on the right of the Paper Clip button)
- Write in tag words appropriate to your blog-post (eg police, corruption, Africa, Nigeria, Balkans, airport etc) in the tag field
- Tick <Enable comments>
- Click <Send for publishing>
Once you can view your blog post:
- Click <Subscribe> to ensure you receive notices when somebody posts a comment to your blog.
If you have any problems uploading your blog-post, contact ISSAT Advocacy and Outreach or the Knowledge Services Team via contact@issat.dcaf.ch.
Copyright and publishing rights
ISSAT’s work is for the benefit of the community at large. As a result we use Creative Commons licences for our work, and so blog texts would come under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike . This essentially means, you retain the rights to be acknowledged for the work, but nobody need ask you in advance to copy or quote the work, and anybody may host the work providing you are attributed. We encourage the posting of the work on other sites, providing there is a link back to the DCAF-ISSAT website and that there is an additional sentence in the byline stating that the work first appeared on the DCAF-ISSAT Community of Practice.
For further information on DCAF-ISSAT terms and conditions visit the Terms and Conditions on the DCAF-ISSAT Community of Practice.
Reposting
Individually appropriate ISSAT blog-posts are reposted on other practitioner websites to increase exposure. Such sites include:
- Capacity4dev.eu
- Capacitydevelopment.ning.com
- Civcap
- INPROL
- Knowledge Platform for Security and Rule of Law