Publishing Questions to a Network

Publishing is how work crosses from the analyst workspace to a forecaster network. Until you publish it, a forecasting question is invisible to forecasters; once you do, it appears in their queue as a request from you.

Both forecasting questions and scenario sets can be published to a network - a scenario set asks forecasters to distribute likelihood across a set of futures rather than answer a single question.

Publishing

From a question's actions menu (or the scenarios page for a scenario set), choose Forecaster Network. The publish flow runs in two steps.

Step 1: Who and What

  • Network - which of your account's networks to publish to. Networks the question is already on are not offered again, so you can see at a glance where it already stands.
  • On behalf of - the sponsor the question is being asked for. Their name and logo appear on the question and in the forecaster's queue. Leave it as "no sponsor" and forecasters see your handle as who is asking.
  • Topics - tag the question so forecasters can filter for it and so it lines up with the expertise they declared.
  • Note for the network - optional context shown to forecasters alongside the question: why the forecast is being requested, what is at stake, and what the answer will be used for.

Step 2: How Often to Ask

Choose between a one-time ask and a recurring one:

  • One-time - forecasters are asked now, with responses due by a date you pick. Presets cover the common windows (a week, two weeks, 30 days, end of month).
  • Recurring - forecasters are asked now and again on a cadence: weekly, monthly, quarterly, or a custom number of days. Each round has its own response window, and you set a date the recurrence stops.

Each new round of a recurring question re-queues it for everyone, including people who already forecast it. Successive rounds build a time series of the network's view. Rounds stop automatically once a question resolves, is voided, or reaches its end date.

What Happens on Publish

Publishing opens the first request round. Forecasters in the audience see the question in their queue immediately and are emailed at whatever frequency they chose - straight away, or in their next digest.

Publishing also kicks off research on the question if it has none yet, so the briefing material forecasters rely on - the state of play report, key sources, and base rate brief - is generated and appears shortly after.

Managing a Published Question

Changing the Sponsor or Note

You can re-attribute a published question to a different sponsor, or revise the note, without republishing. The schedule is fixed at publish time.

Retracting

Retracting removes a question from the network. It disappears from forecasters' queues and lists, and no further recurring rounds open. Forecasts already submitted are kept. Publishing it again opens a fresh round.

Clarifications

If a question turns out to be ambiguous, post a clarification rather than editing the question underneath people who have already answered. Clarifications appear on the question page under Official Clarifications, and you can notify everyone who has forecast it. Their existing forecasts stand; the email tells them to revise if the clarification changes their thinking.

Voiding

When a question can no longer be resolved fairly - the world moved on, the wording was broken, the resolution source disappeared - void it. A voided question closes for forecasting and is never scored, so nobody's accuracy is affected by it. Forecasters who took part are notified and told their record is untouched. Voiding can be undone.

Voiding and clarifying are also available to network admins directly on the network, so neither requires access to the analysis the question came from.

Creating Questions on the Network

Network admins can also write a question directly on the network with New question on the questions page, without going through an analysis first. The question is attached to the network's owning account and published to that network in one flow. There is an AI autofill to draft the question's fields from a short prompt.

A question created this way is not attached to an analysis, so its crowd forecast has no analysis to feed back into. Questions created inside an analysis do feed back into it.

What Comes Back

As forecasters respond, their estimates aggregate into a crowd forecast that appears on the question in the analyst workspace alongside AI forecasts and any internal estimates. When the question resolves, everyone who forecast it is scored, notified, and their accuracy record and the network leaderboard update.