Citizen Space launches- an open source consultation and engagement platform

25. November 2010 – 18:39 by Delib

PEP-NET member Delib has launched Citizen Space, an open-source consultation and engagement platform. Citizen Space has been developed as a collaborative project between the UK Government and digital democracy company Delib, and has been designed to help government departments to set-up, organise and publicise consultations across the internet with one easy-to-use system.

Co-design

Co-design has been at the heart of the Citizen Space project, with government departments involved at each stage of Citizen Space’s 12 month development process.

Easy-to-use and empowering

Key objectives that Citizen Space has been designed to address include:

- Manage and organise multiple consultations across multiple policy teams

- Share consultation information openly in a structured way

- Create a easy and robust way to create online consultations on complex policy documents

- Provide a way to easily analyse consultation data (both qualitative and quantitative)

- Provide a central space to manage / track responses – whether it’s online responses or postal responses

Open source

Citizen Space has been developed as an open-source consultation and engagement platform, enabling government departments and the wider digital democracy community to build on the foundations that have been developed, leveraging efficiencies by sharing development costs and benefits.

The open source nature of the Citizen Space platform also means that government departments are flexible in how they implement and use Citizen Space, as they’re not bound by specific vendor licenses.

An expandable suite of online engagement tools

Citizen Space is a set of open source software, which consists of Consultation Finder and Quick Consult. Importantly, Citizen Space is designed as an open-source platform which can be freely added to over time – with all improvements benefiting the government community as a whole.

Consultation Finder

Consultation Finder is a centralised hub designed to help in-house teams manage consultation processes efficiently online.

* Central platform for multi-partner management

* Consultation database to find and sort multiple consultations

* Easy-to-use content management system

* RSS syndication for sharing

Quick Consult

Quick Consult is an online consultation app designed to allow government departments to quickly and easily create an interactive policy consultation.

* Easily set up both linear and non-linear online consultations

* Let people comment on complex policy-documents

* Analyse quantitative and qualitative data

* Manage respondents live