Structured intake with process metadata
Capturing how a submission was put together (timing, structure, what was typed and what was pasted) as a byproduct of the intake itself, so the preparation signal itself costs the submitter no extra effort to produce. Reviewers get context on how an entry was prepared without asking the submitter for a separate declaration or proof of how they wrote it.
The impact of agents
Once agent drafting is the ordinary way submissions are produced, the entries with no preparation signal will approach the whole of the intake. A 2,000-word consultation response looks identical whether it was personally drafted over a week, generated by an AI in thirty seconds, or circulated as a form letter by a campaign organization. Decision-makers need process metadata to interpret what they read: the signal exists so a reader can weigh an entry, never so the system can screen it out unread.
What must be verified
Decision-makers need the preparation signal to be reliable enough to weigh. The agency operating the intake platform must capture it automatically, as a byproduct of the submission flow, and answer for its accuracy when a decision-maker relies on it.
Protecting access
A guided, sectioned intake raises the cost of submitting. A time-poor submitter, or one in distress, is deterred by a form that demands justification section by section. Multi-section navigation is harder work for screen-reader and switch users than a single text box. Session capture (timing, edit counts, paste patterns) is exactly what a submitter with well-founded caution about surveillance will refuse, and if they walk away, the channel has deterred them. The free-text escape hatch can become the low-status route whose submissions read as second class.
Keeping the path open
- Treat the free-text alternative as an equivalent submission that simply comes with less process metadata.
- Disclose what the session records before the submitter begins the form.
- Let the paste prompt be dismissed without penalty, and keep it non-blocking for assistive technology, reachable by keyboard, and announced when it appears.
Response surface
Sectioned intake fields gather how a submission was built as a byproduct of writing it, never as a gate the submitter has to clear.
We record how this form is filled in: timing and paste events, not what your words say.
No content is analyzed, only how the submission was built. A free-text submission has less of this.
Maturity
- Emerging
For the building blocks, where session analytics, paste detection, and structured forms are mature, and a software audit trail (vendor-documented in Xero as a timestamped, per-user log of changes to financial records) offers a partial analogue, though not the interview-level preparation provenance the frontier rung needs.
- Frontier Headline
For capturing preparation method as a byproduct of intake: no government consultation platform currently records it as structured data.
Precedents
Google Docs edit history and Show Editors. Docs records who wrote or edited every passage with timestamps and color-coded attribution, Show Editors reveals the edit provenance of any highlighted range, and version history preserves each prior state. Per-passage authorship is produced by the editing itself, at no additional cost to the writer.
Citizen Space consultation analytics (Delib). The platform captures submission metadata including timing patterns, completion rates, and session data, and its operator commits to keeping AI analysis traceable to the original submission. The metadata describes the submission event (when it arrived, from what address, how long the session ran) and records nothing about how the response was prepared.
Agentic AI UX pattern catalog (Smashing Magazine). The catalog sets out Action Audit and Undo, and Explainable Rationale and Confidence Signal, as concrete designs for a human-legible record of what an AI system did and why. Each pattern assumes the AI tool keeps that record itself.
Australian Senate committee form-letter disclosure. Senate committees list 'submissions received as standard form letters, including form letters with additional individual comments' as a disclosed category of the official record. Campaign origin is captured and published at intake, without asking the submitter for anything extra.
What carries over to agent use
High transferability for the design principle; medium for implementation. The tax software model is the strongest analogue: a structured workflow that captures process metadata as a natural byproduct. A government consultation platform could implement this through a structured composition environment (sectioned guidance that captures timing and paste patterns per section), a non-blocking paste-detection prompt that creates a natural disclosure moment, and session metadata (duration, edit count, sequence, typed-to-pasted ratio) treated as behavioral rather than content analysis.
The critical limitation is that process metadata from the submission platform captures only the final-mile activity. If a user drafts in Word, refines with ChatGPT, and pastes the result, the platform sees only the paste event. The tax software model works because preparation happens inside the tool; consultation submissions are typically prepared externally.
Where things go wrong
Structured intake's timing and paste-pattern signal can itself be gamed: an agent that types at a scripted human pace and pastes in staggered fragments can make machine-drafted text read as personally composed. Structured intake records how a user prepared a submission, so it doesn't catch a decision-side failure. Its design principle still transfers: capturing a complete provenance chain from raw inputs to final output, as a byproduct of the workflow, is exactly the auditability that an opaque calculation pipeline lacks.
Sources
7 references
The instrument, the operating deployment, or the official record itself.
- Show Editors in Google Docs — Google Workspace Updates
- Engage Victoria — Victoria's online consultation platform
- Set up a public consultation project on Engage Victoria — vic.gov.au digital guide
- Have Your Say — nsw.gov.au
- Australian Senate climate committee — submissions received as standard form letters
Writing about the subject rather than the framework itself, including vendor commentary.