Back in December we described how Cumbria’s consultation partnership is using Citizen Space to aggregate engagement activity from their twelve partner organisations into a single, searchable portal.
Version 1 of the Aggregator was an exciting first step, but we’ve always had plans to make it even more flexible. Instead of just bringing together the consultations from a pre-defined group of partners, what if you could collect together consultations from anywhere on the Internet?
Though it’s currently very much in alpha, we thought we’d give you a sneak preview of Aggregator 2.0, which will be included in future releases of Citizen Space. And what better way to show off our work than to aggregate all our Citizen Space consultations in one place?
But the Aggregator isn’t limited to Citizen Space consultations. We’ve made use of two established Web standards, RSS and RDFa, to ensure interoperability with other compliant websites. If a third-party consultation system publishes its list of consultations in an RSS feed, and marks up its consultations using the RDFa standard (as recommended by UK central government) then the Aggregator can include them in its results.
For even more flexibility, the Aggregator can take RSS feeds generated from specific search queries on other sites. This means that you could use it to collate and maintain an up-to-date list of worldwide consultations on your specific subject area.
Since it wouldn’t be fair to collect all that juicy data and not give something back, the Aggregator also publishes its own findings as an RSS feed for use by third-party apps and widgets. We’ve even included a snippet of the feed in the sidebar of this blog!
For more information about Citizen Space, visit www.citizenspace.com or get in touch.
adam.cardew@delib.co.uk | 0845 638 1848
