Field Guide
Hundreds of Contributors, Six Editors
Two Models
The Funnel and the Open Floor
Model one is the funnel: the crowd keeps writing in Word, and a trained editor team imports, structures, and publishes. Contributors change nothing about how they work; the organization buys six seats instead of three hundred; and quality control lives with people who do it all day. The price is paid at the neck of the funnel — the editors become the queue, and every hand-off is one more place where versions drift and formatting mutates in translation.
Model two is the open floor: everyone works inside the structured system, signed in through the organization's SSO, with permissions scoped to role and section. Nothing is re-keyed, the history is complete, and the bottleneck dissolves. The price moves upstream: training a wide population to work in an editor with guardrails, and paying for the seats.
The Choice
Follow the Shape of Your Crowd
The licensing math is usually what decides, so it deserves honest treatment. Authoring platforms price per named seat, and the gap between six full seats and three hundred is a budget line, not a rounding error. But the crowd is rarely uniform: most organizations have a handful of people who touch the documents weekly, a ring who contribute quarterly, and a long tail who submit one paragraph a year. Forcing one model onto that whole curve is how both failures happen — the funnel that chokes on frequent contributors, or the seat bill that pays for accounts nobody logs into.
The stable answer is layered: full seats for the owning team, scoped authoring for frequent contributors, review-and-comment access for the tail, and the editors doing the final lift on whatever arrives from outside. We've configured this machinery for organizations on both ends — including a national rules body whose entire workflow runs through a small expert team — and the constant is that the wall's position matters less than its clarity: everyone should know which side they work on, and the system should enforce it rather than the org chart.
FAQ
Questions We Hear
What is the funnel model, and when does it make sense?
In the funnel model, subject-matter experts keep drafting wherever they already work — usually Word — and a small trained editor team brings the material into the structured system, styles it, and publishes. It fits organizations where contributions arrive occasionally from many people who will never learn a new tool: the experts' burden stays at zero, licensing stays small, and quality control concentrates in a handful of hands. Its cost is the funnel itself — the editor team becomes the bottleneck, and every import is a chance for content to mutate in translation.
What does the everyone-inside model look like?
Every contributor gets an account — typically through the organization's single sign-on, so there are no new passwords — and works directly in the structured editor, with permissions scoped to their role and their sections. Drafts, reviews, and approvals all happen in one place with one history. The gains are real: no re-keying, no version confusion, an audit trail that covers authorship rather than just editing. The costs are equally real: training a wide population and paying for many more seats.
How does the licensing math actually work?
Structured authoring platforms typically price per named editor seat, and the difference between six seats and three hundred is the difference between a rounding error and a budget line. That's why the funnel model persists even at organizations that could train everyone: hundreds of occasional contributors may not justify hundreds of licenses. Many platforms soften this with tiered roles — full authoring seats for the core team, cheaper review-and-comment seats for the crowd — which is often the pragmatic middle.
Can the two models be mixed?
They usually should be. The stable pattern we see: the documents' owning team works fully inside the system; frequent contributors get scoped authoring seats; occasional contributors submit through review-and-comment access or structured intake, with editors doing the final lift. The mistake is not choosing a mix — it's pretending the organization is all one kind of contributor and forcing a single model onto both ends of the curve.
Get In Touch
Where Should Your Wall Go?
We've built both models and the mixes in between. Tell us the shape of your contributor curve and we'll tell you what the seat count should actually be.