Feature Tour
Plays nicely with others
Link to consultations elsewhere on the Web
Citizen Space does not tie you in to any particular way of consulting. The system includes Quick Consult, a flexible and powerful online survey tool, which is fully integrated with Citizen Space's reporting and analysis tools. However, you can create consultation records that link to any third-party survey tools. These records are listed on your Consultation Hub and are searchable in exactly the same way as Quick Consult consultations.
You might also want to link your consultations to third-party apps such as EventBrite (for ticketing offline events), or to consultations hosted on a partner organisation's website.
» Tip: how to embed an EventBrite consultation into Citizen Space
Embed rich media
It's easy to illustrate your consultations and make them more engaging by embedding rich, interactive content from other sites, such as:
- maps from Google
- videos from YouTube
- slideshows from Scribd
- Live streaming of video or web chat
Most sites that provide an 'embed' option for their content can be used with Citizen Space. For example one of our clients embedded an interactive Google Street View™ window into their consultation to illustrate the location of street furniture that was under discussion.
» Tip: five ways to improve consultation through embedded content.
Embedding rich mediaWeb standards for sharing data
In compliance with Central Government guidelines, Citizen Space includes RDFa metadata on all its consultation overview pages. This metadata contains information such as the consultation's title, description, start and end dates, marked in such a way that it can be automatically read and understood by third-party websites and services.
Citizen Space also provides RSS feeds of all its forthcoming, open and closed consultations, along with custom feeds that are generated in response to searching the site. End users can subscribe to an RSS feed of consultations, so that they are automatically informed when a consultation is added or updated.
However, RSS (especially combined with RDFa) has many other uses. A third-party website could subscribe to a Citizen Space RSS feed to embed the list of consultations within its own pages. Our Aggregator add-on can combine several RSS feeds to provide a single, searchable database of consultations published by many different organisations.
» Tip: what is RDFa? What is the semantic web? Should I be using them?
Citizen Space Aggregator