We would rather publish a sharp argument we disagree with

If you work in AI assurance, security, governance, or the regulation of any of them, and you have seen something worth arguing about, we want to read it. What matters is that you have done the work you are describing — not your title, your employer, or whether we have heard of you.

Read this page before you write. Nothing on it is a formality: every rule exists because a piece was declined for want of it, and following them is most of the difference between a draft we can publish and one we cannot.

The audience is engineers, risk and compliance leaders, auditors, legal and finance professionals, and policy people. Practitioners, in short, who will be asked to defend a judgement and who can tell substance from hype at a glance. Write for them.

A clear argument, a lesson from real work, or a contrarian read on something the field is currently nodding along to. The perspective is the whole point. A safe survey of the consensus is the one thing we will not run, however well written — it is already available everywhere else.

These are the themes we publish against. An idea outside them is welcome if it is genuinely for this audience — send a line describing it before you write the piece, so neither of us spends a weekend on something that was never going to fit.

Room to build an argument and take its obvious objection seriously, without turning into a report. Fifteen hundred is a ceiling rather than a target: if the point lands at nine hundred, stop there. One argument, led with rather than buried — if your thesis first appears in the eighth paragraph, the first seven are the ones to cut.

Send one or two working titles and a one-line summary we can use as the excerpt. Write in plain, direct prose: a practitioner talking to peers, not a whitepaper. Cut the throat-clearing opener; nobody has ever finished a piece because it began with “in today's fast-moving landscape”.

The shape is set, and following it saves everyone the round of edits that is purely about structure: the article format gives the five parts with a word count each, and a scaffold to draft against.

This is the line we hold hardest, because a body that certifies competence cannot publish machine-written opinion under a practitioner's name and expect either to be believed.

The article must be substantially your own work.The argument, the judgement, and the voice have to be yours. AI tools may help you draft, tighten, or research, and we have no objection to any of that — but you are accountable for every claim in the piece, and something essentially generated will not be published.

Disclose material AI assistance. A single line at the end is enough: “Drafted with AI assistance; the views, claims, and errors are my own.” Disclosure is never held against a piece. The absence of it, where it was warranted, is.

AI-generated images are welcome for the header or for illustration, with no disclosure needed. The exception is anything that carries information: never generate a chart, a figure, a dataset, or a quotation.

It must be unpublished and yours to give. No plagiarism, and nothing already live elsewhere. A reworked version of your own earlier writing is fine if you tell us where it ran.

Link to primary sources wherever they exist — the standard, the regulation, the paper, the repository, the company's own page — rather than to somebody's account of them. It is the same discipline the framework guides on this site are written to, and it is the difference between a claim a reader can check and one they have to take on trust.

Back anything non-obvious. Where the evidence is thin or the position is contested, say so in the sentence rather than in a footnote — a hedged claim with its uncertainty stated is worth more here than a confident one that turns out to have been a guess. Two to six links is a healthy range at this length.

Vendor pitches. Mention your product once, in context, where it genuinely bears on the argument. A piece whose shape is an advertisement gets declined, and nothing published here may suggest that the Council has assessed, approved, or accredited a product or service.

Unsupported certainty. If a claim is your opinion or your bet, frame it as one.

Filler. If a paragraph could be deleted without loss, delete it before we do.

Anything defamatory or confidential, or that you do not hold the rights to publish. Assume your employer's counsel will read it.

Contributors are often candidates, members, or people working toward a Council credential, so this needs saying plainly. Publishing here is not an endorsement of you, your employer, or your product, and it confers no advantage of any kind in an examination, an application, or a certification decision. Assessment is separate from editorial, and stays that way.

The reverse holds too: we will publish an argument that disagrees with the Council's own position, and have no interest in a blog that only agrees with us. What we will not publish is a piece that implies the Council has certified something it has not — the boundary is set by the terms of use and the Code of Professional Conduct, which bind credential holders whether they are writing or not.

Send us, with the draft:

• Your name and title.
• A bio of one or two lines.
• One link — LinkedIn, your company, or a personal site.
• A headshot, if you would like one shown.

If you hold a Council credential, we will show the post-nominal alongside your name. We will not add one you have not earned, and we will not remove one you have.

You retain ownership and copyright. By sending a draft you grant the Council a non-exclusive right to publish it here and to promote it on the Council's channels, always with attribution to you.

You are free to republish elsewhere afterwards; a link back is appreciated but not required. If you ask us to take a piece down, we will, and we will say on the page that it was withdrawn at the author's request rather than leaving a silent gap.

Upload the article as an editable Word or OpenDocument file with a brief summary, and read the article format before you start, because it is the shape we edit to.