Name them in the submission’s description itself — Kind Channel gives each idea one author field, so a co-creator, source or inspiration has nowhere else to go. State plainly what they contributed, near the top, not buried in a closing thank-you. Forking is the one exception: it credits an original author automatically, linking back to their idea without you writing anything.
Flow diagram of 4 steps: Name the person and their actual contribution, Put it near the top of the description, not the end, Say what is yours and what is theirs, Check the wording with them before you submit.
Every idea submitted to Kind Channel is tied to a single signed-in account at the moment it is created: one author name, one author email, attached automatically because you have to be signed in to submit at all. There is no second name field on the form, no co-author checkbox, no way to list two people as equal credited authors on the same submission. If an idea was genuinely built by two or three people together, the platform still only records one of them as its author.
That is a real limitation of the tool, not a judgement about how ideas actually get made — plenty of them are made by more than one person. It means the crediting problem is not something the submission form solves for you. It has to be solved in the words you write inside it, before you submit, because there is nowhere else for that information to live once the idea is out of your hands.
The description field is free text, so it can hold whatever the form’s single author field cannot: who else contributed, and what they specifically did. The difference between credit that reads as genuine and credit that reads as a token gesture is specificity and position — a vague thank-you buried in a closing line does not function as attribution, even when it is sincere, because a reader has no way to tell what it is actually crediting.
Not ’thanks to everyone who helped’ — say what they did: ran the test sessions, wrote the closing line, first suggested the format.
A credit in the last sentence reads as an afterthought even when it is not one. Near the top, it reads as part of how the idea came to exist.
If they proposed the core idea and you developed the format, say that split plainly rather than letting the description imply the whole thing was one person’s.
They cannot edit the submission after it is live. If the credit is going to represent their work, it should say what they would say themselves.
A source is something you took from without that person doing any work on your submission specifically — an article, an existing show format, an idea you saw someone else post that this one is a response to or a variation on. A collaborator is someone who worked on this exact submission with you. Both need naming, but for different reasons and in different ways.
Crediting a source means saying plainly what you took and what you changed: ’this format adapts the round-table structure used by [show/format], shortened to fit a single guest.’ It does not require that person’s permission, because you are describing a public thing they made, not attributing private labour to them. Crediting a collaborator is closer to a byline — it is saying a specific, real person helped build the specific thing you are submitting, and getting that wrong (naming the wrong contribution, or naming someone who barely touched it) misrepresents their work rather than just your influences.
There is one situation where Kind Channel handles credit for you rather than leaving it to your description: forking an idea that is already live on the platform. A fork automatically records the original author’s name and links back to their idea on the page for yours, under a ’Built upon’ section — and the original idea’s page lists your fork under ’Evolved into’, with your name attached to what you changed. That link exists whether or not you mention the original author in your own words, because it is stored as data, not prose.
The limitation is that forking only works for ideas that were themselves submitted and are visible on the platform. A conversation with a friend that shaped your idea, a collaborator who worked with you privately before either of you submitted anything, or an idea you saw somewhere else entirely — none of those go through the fork mechanism, because there is no live submission to fork. For all of them, crediting still has to happen in your own description, the same as any other collaborator or source.
A name in an approved submission is public, searchable and effectively permanent — it does not come down if the person later changes their mind about being associated with the idea, or if the idea does not get picked up the way either of you hoped. That is reason enough to ask before naming someone, not just after submitting as a courtesy. This matters most for a private person who is not expecting to be named publicly: a source who told you something in confidence, a collaborator who has not decided whether they want their name tied to something that might not be selected, or anyone whose contribution touches on something sensitive about their own life.
If someone declines to be named, the honest fix is to describe the contribution without the name — ’a volunteer coordinator I spoke with suggested this format’ — rather than removing the contribution from the description entirely. Dropping it altogether would misrepresent the idea as entirely your own thinking, which is a different and worse problem than declining to name someone who asked not to be.
No. Each idea is tied to a single signed-in account at the moment it is submitted, and there is no second author field on the form. If an idea was built by more than one person, the fix is to name the other contributor and their specific role inside the description itself, since that is the only place the platform lets that information live.
No — it does the opposite. Forking automatically links your idea back to the original, showing the original author’s name under a ’Built upon’ section on your idea’s page, and lists your fork under theirs as something it ’evolved into’. That link is generated by the platform, not by anything you write.
Ask first if the person is private and not already expecting public attribution — a source who spoke to you in confidence, or a collaborator who has not agreed to have their name tied to an idea that might not be picked up. A name in an approved idea is public and effectively permanent, which is exactly why asking after submitting is too late to matter.
That is a source, not a collaborator, and it does not need that person’s permission to credit — you are describing something they made public, not attributing private work to them. Say plainly what you took and what you changed, for example naming the format or article your version adapts and how your version differs from it.