By the Equality in Forensics Contributor Team
Disclosure is a common norm in competitive circuit debate events such as Lincoln-Douglas, policy, and Public Forum. Competitive PF debaters should understand the value of disclosure and arguments surrounding it.
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“Disclosure” is a norm in PF that asks debaters to release all previously read case positions on the “debate wiki.”
When you log into openCaselist, you have many schools listed, and you can see any disclosed cases from those schools. You also have the ability to find arguments from past topics by changing the time period you are looking at.
Once you click on an individual team from a school, you can see the tournament they were competing at, the round they were competing in, their opponent in the round, the judge, the round report (the collapse strategy used in the round), and the “open-sourced” case position they used in the round. There will usually only be a few case positions disclosed at any given tournament because teams who follow this norm will only disclose the same version of a case once.
Disclosure was proliferated with the intention of bridging the gap between high and low resource schools, increasing the depth of debate by increasing the pool of evidence, and doing a quality check on evidence that is disclosed to the circuit. However, it can often disincentivize teams from writing their own cases or conducting their own research if they can just steal other cases. Nonetheless, it is a PF norm to be aware of.
That’s honestly up to you. Once you have read enough about disclosure and hear other people’s thoughts about it, you can decide if it’s something you are comfortable with doing. Most people on the circuit disclose, and many tech judges “hack” for disclosure, meaning that if you don’t disclose and your opponents run disclosure theory against you, they will vote for your opponents quite easily. Once you start disclosing, you will have to keep up with it quite well: make sure you update your wiki page after each round with your case and round report or else someone will probably read theory against you. Despite this, if you are against some part of the norm, you can always make a disclosure counter interpretation to defend that position in rounds where someone reads theory against you.