• Link your consultation records to awesome sites such as EventBrite, so that consultations you’re running elsewhere on the web (or even offline) are still listed and searchable through Citizen Space.
• Embed rich media from sites such as Google Maps, YouTube and Scribd into your consultation records.
• Take the RSS feeds that Citizen Space publishes, and embed them on your organisation’s main website to provide an up-to-date list of consultations.

We love these features and so do our clients, and they’re definitely not going away.  However, we really want to provide more flexible ways to open up the data held within Citizen Space, and that’s why we’re so excited about our new API.  “API” is short for “Application Programming Interface”. This is a set of documented procedures that third-party systems can use to communicate with an application.

API integration with Citizen Space requires more technical know-how than the features described above, so it’s something for your web or IT team to get their teeth into.  The important thing is that the API doesn’t care what platform or language you use for your existing infrastructure.  Citizen Space is written in Python and uses the Zope application framework, but other organisations may use WordPress, .net or Drupal for their websites, which are written in other languages such as PHP.  Using the API, your tech team can use the languages and platforms that are familiar to them, but still access and manipulate the data held in Citizen Space.

Version 1 of Citizen Space’s API (included with April’s release of Citizen Space) is all about getting public consultation details out of the system so that you can include them in your own site.  We’re providing ways to embed search forms, search results, consultation listings and consultation overview pages into your site.  We’ve also made a WordPress plugin to make it even easier – you can include much of Citizen Space’s frontend functionality in your WordPress site without writing a line of code.

But that’s only the first step.  Version 1 of the API provides all of its output in simple, cleanly formatted HTML.  This is quick and easy to work with, but we’d like to build on it by providing other output formats such as JSON and XML.  We also want to publish more plugins for other systems, code snippets and example projects, because even we haven’t investigated all the exciting opportunities that this API provides.  We’ve set ourselves up on Github, so all our Citizen Space integration projects will live there.

Looking further ahead, we’re going to think about how the API could be extended to include data from Citizen Space’s admin areas (with suitable authentication of course).  For example, would you like to check your organisation’s intranet dashboard and see how many responses your QuickConsult consultations have had?  We also want to consider how the API could be used to get information into Citizen Space.

Is there information in Citizen Space that you’d particularly like to access from elsewhere?  Are there applications you’d like Citizen Space to play more nicely with? Are you using our API already?  We’d love to hear from you.

We know that lots of our clients currently use WordPress for parts of their online presence, so the first thing I wanted to build using the API was a plugin for WordPress. I wanted people to be able to embed consultation listings, search facilities and entire consultation records into their WordPress sites, without having to know PHP or any other programming language.

WordPress provides a handy facility called shortcodes. These are keywords written in square brackets [like this]. If you type one of these shortcodes into a blog post or page, WordPress interprets it in a special way and replaces it with dynamically generated content. If you download and install the Citizen Space plugin in your WordPress site, you will have four new shortcodes available to you:

citizenspace_basic_search - embeds the short keyword search form

citizenspace_advanced_search - embeds the advanced consultation search form.

citizenspace_search_results - embeds a list of consultations matching a predefined search, or based on the on the form fields above.

citizenspace_consultation - embeds an individual consultation record

If you want to embed a fully functional consultation finder in your WordPress site, all you need to do (after installing the plugin) is paste the 3 lines below into your page or post:

[citizenspace_advanced_search]
Search Results
[citizenspace_search_results]

Check out this demo, which uses the three lines above to embed Citizen Space inside WordPress.

If you are confident with writing PHP code, please feel free to fork the plugin code on Github and submit your own contribution, or use it as the basis for your own Citizen Space integration project. If you find this code useful, we’d love to hear from you.

It’s important in any consultation that the respondents are informed about the topic at hand, which is why there is relevant information embedded within the online consultation.

At the top of each page of the consultation is an embedded PDF of the consultation document; this is also included on the initial overview page of the consultation. This makes it easy for respondents to read the document in context without leaving the consultation page.

When information from the consultation document is relevant to a specific question it has been provided as ‘More information’ under the question.

There are also text boxes at the end of every question to encourage respondents to justify their responses. This encourages deliberation, and gives the opportunity to provide any supporting evidence which could then be considered by the Department of Health when reviewing the proposals at the end of the consultation period.

More information can be found on the Department of Health’s blog. The consultation is open until July 10th 2012.

This conveniently brings me onto shared services and collaboration within Local Government. Each department has its own remit, but fundamentally the prime objective is the same: to offer value for money and to provide a service that will stand up to scrutiny.

Too often, within the realm of consultations, there appears to be a lack of dialogue between departments. Whether you work in the Planning Department or the Communications Department, the overall aim of consulting with the public should be clear; to garner as much interest (and therefore responses) as is humanly possible.

Arguably because of the “Duty to Involve” citizens in the LDF consultation process, Local Government appears to give more weight to Local Development Framework (LDF) consultations. As a result, their Communications Department colleagues must get on board with the Planning Department’s software choice or, more often, select their own consultation software. It doesn’t have to be this way.

All departments can happily co-exist within Citizen Space land. The more users the merrier!  But fear not, this is not some haphazard approach – Citizen Space has been robustly tested by Government and industry experts alike.

We appreciate that the LDF is a suite of documents, guiding development within Local Authorities. Producing them can therefore be a time-consuming and challenging matter for Planning Departments as they will frequently wrestle with producing a range of documentation that constitutes the LDF including:

• Core Strategy
• Site Allocations and Development Management
• Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL)
• Local Development Scheme
• Statement of Community Involvement
• Sustainability Appraisals

That said, planning consultations are seldom user-friendly, hence the low response rates and general apathy that surrounds them.

We are aware that making the user-experience as engaging as possible will increase participation considerably. How can this be achieved in reality?  To increase participation and crush apathy in the democratic process, we must make the task of participating in consultations as pleasurable as possible.

We therefore place heavy emphasis on visual stimuli – such as….

As you can see, we also specialise in embedding free rich-media in consultation records, utilising Google Street View, Google Maps, Vimeo, You Tube, Scribd, Slideshare etc. They are gold!

This has resulted in more participation from target audiences.

Within this austerity period, increasing pressures on efficiency and cost savings, combined with growing legislative drivers, are encouraging more local authorities to discuss their consultation requirements with us.

So why not get in touch?

We’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to call our make-the-online-engagement-process-better (AKA Citizen Space) team to talk through your requirements.

Both current and future clients can now benefit from a range of new features, including these two great additions worth explaining in detail:

1) Generated graphical PDF reports

All Quick Consult consultations now include an extra link on the consultation dashboard to create a summary report in PDF format. Citizen Space administrators have the option to create a report which can be used to both track open consultations’ progress or provide a quick and easy to use summary report of closed consultations’ outcomes.

We are really excited about this new feature and have already been chatting to our current clients about some of the potential benefits and use cases. The analysis of results and subsequent consultation feedback loop back to the public can now be much quicker and easier.  For example reports can be generated quickly for a meeting with stakeholders and policy makers to review/assess progress.

• For questions where respondents can select at most one answer, such as radio buttons or a drop down, a pie chart is displayed:

• For questions where respondents can select more than one answer, such as checkboxes, a bar chart is displayed:

2) Mailing list sign up for Quick Consult respondents

Respondents can now have the option to opt-in to a mailing list once they have completed a response.  The email list can then be exported and used to keep respondents informed on consultation outcomes and results. The email address opt-in feature can be enabled on a per-consultation basis to ensure that it is only used on relevant consultations.

The text above the email opt-in option can be easily edited by the administrator to ensure that respondents will know how their email address will be used.

It is possible to view the number of email signups at any stage of the consultation on the dashboard without needing to download the list.

We also included continuous improvements across the app that many of our users will no doubt appreciate; such as a nice bright ‘Jump to a page’ bar on the ‘view response’ page:

For more information on Citizen Space or to request a demonstration please contact one of our Team on 0845 638 1848.

You can now see their live consultation hub and view their current consultations running on the ‘get involved’ subdomain of their site.

They have decided to use Citizen Space to aid their consultation process. You can view their Citizen Space now to see all of their consultations online.

To see their current online engagement, you can go to Stroud District Consultation Hub now or see their consultations as part of our Citizen Space aggregator.

“Being able to complete a survey in the privacy of your own home or even on your mobile phone during the bus ride home opens a door to views from many more groups within the community we serve”

Angela Beagrie

Stockport PCT have managed to use the system incredibly effectively to engage stakeholders since they adopted it last year. Here are some of the tools they have been using:

• As the site is fully accessible, patients with a visual disability can use text readers to hear questions.

• The capacity to add on video clips within consultation records means that the PCT can offer surveys in sign language.

• Surveys can also be translated into alternative languages to provide an increased understanding of the views, experiences and needs of local ethnic minority populations.

Stockport PCT has also used Citizen Space to contact the younger and working members of their community. The system is easy to use, which is vital when consulting stakeholders regularly,

“We can do more consultations with less staff, and reach out to more and more people”

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of using Citizen Space in your organisation, please get in touch or request a demo

Importantly, key things I wanted to pick up on was how Citizen Space can be used as a hub where consultation teams can manage their whole consultation process through – including bringing together both offline and online feedback together, so you’ve got all your consultation data in one place – enabling you to be more organised, and allowing you to more easily and quickly analyse and report your consultation findings.

Here’s a quick overview of how Citizen Space could help you do this:

As noted above, the key parts of the consultation process Citizen Space can help improve are:

• Collaborative drafting: draft your consultation questions together with colleagues, and allow others to edit and update – showing how the consultation questionnaire would look and work but in a closed secure online space (rather than endlessly sharing word documents between your team!)
• Publish your online consultation and supporting documents in an interactive format: Citizen Space allows you to upload all your consultation documents in one place, alongside your consultation survey – allowing stakeholders to read background information and feedback easily at the same time.
• Ongoing management and tracking: once your consultation’s underway and people are feeding back, you can keep an eye on the results as they come in, and do quick analysis any time during the process.
• Collating online and offline feedback together: one of the big challenges in managing a consultation process is that you’ll often get feedback from stakeholders in different formats: e.g. paper surveys, emails, .pdfs, comments from events. What Citizen Space allows you to do is collate all feedback from whatever format (once transcribed) into one central database, so that you can then analyse all the feedback quickly and easily. The system also provides each feedback record with a Unique ID, so that all records are easily tracked. Delib also provide *transcription services*, to help you transcribe feedback from different formats into a digital format.
• Analysis and reporting: finally, at the end of the process you can easily analyse all the data you’ve collated using Citizen Space. Additionally, we can provide a 3rd Party analysis and reporting service from YouGov if you’d prefer 3rd party validation.

So, there you go! Hopefully that gives a good overview of how Citizen Space can be used to help ensure you run robust and pain-free consultation processes. If you’ve got any questions, just drop us a note: info@Delib.net

Avon and Somerset Police have been using the following features as part of their consultation process:

1) The Featured Consultation setting in Citizen Space has been used to highlight the recent Budget Setting Consultation:

2) Using a video on the consultation homepage to improve engagement and explain to local stakeholders the purpose of the consultation:

3) Uploading large documents through the fact bank feature using a document viewing programme such as Scribd.

4) Detailing offline consultation and opportunities to meet and greet on the front page of the consultation record

5) Ensure the questions are clear and short and that the consultation doesn’t take long too fill in.

In terms of using Citizen Space as part of their wider consultation during their Policing Priorities Summer 2011 consultation for example, Avon and Somerset Police Authority promoted their Citizen Space through the following methods:

1) Simple ballot style cards with the most pertinent questions from the consultation were available to event visitors. This ensured that the most relevant areas of the consultation were fully consulted on.
2) Ensuring paper copies of the survey were available to community and Neighbourhood Watch groups.
3) Pens and fridge magnets with the site url written on them were given out at events such as St Pauls Carnival and Bath and West shows:

4) Small pocket sized consultation cards which were handed out in order to promote the site.

5) Police masks were also given out to children to wear as part of St Pauls carnival (as modelled by our consultants

For further information on Citizen Space or using the system to supplement your consultation needs then please contact Ben or Giles on 0845 638 1848.