PlaceSpeak is a place-based public consultation platform that connects citizen participants with proponents of issues taking place in their own neighbourhoods.

Our mandate is to enable enhanced engagement and meaningful dialogue on local issues toward informed decision-making and public policy development.

Our platform is unique because:

1. Consultations are based in authenticity, connecting people to place in a verifiable way

2. We're growing a community of citizens who want to know about and be engaged in issues impacting them

3. We host multiple topics on one platform; providing many opportunities for citizen engagement and leading to a continually growing community of citizens.

How does it work?
Citizen participants 'claim their place' by registering and verifying their addresses, to ensure consultation connections are authentic. Once citizens are verified, they can 'speak their mind' by connecting to organizations and policy makers who are conducting public consultations or seeking participation on issues.

Citizens can influence local decisions that impact them, and proponents can ensure they're receiving feedback from real people in the relevant places, leading to evidence-based decision making.

Problem

People need a reliable and accessible way to connect with their local decision and policy makers. Decision and policy makers need to connect with people to generate verifiable evidence to support their decision-making. Both parties need this connection to be authentic. Public Consultation practices have become less and less relevant as most people do not want to attend public meetings. Online consultation until now has been anonymous and anecdotal from a decision-making perspective. Each consultation has typically taken place on a different website with different format, making them difficult to find and use for the participants. The need is to bring public consultation best practices into the 21st century and ultimately enable direct democracy online. The PlaceSpeak model is scalable, and everyone can benefit from increased access to authentic and meaningful public dialogue. Thanks to ever growing internet coverage and usership, and ubiquity of smart phones, PlaceSpeak has the capacity to engage and impact communities from the most cosmopolitan cities, to the most remote rural settlements.

Solution

PlaceSpeak authenticates participants to their addresses so that their input can be verified by decision-makers. Our 'geo-social media' solution provides an accessible and transparent platform for dialogue that builds a continuous community around engagement and participation. Increasing internet access and use by all demographics in all geographies, free access for participants, and accessible pricing points for proponents, mean that the barriers to uptake are very low.

Example

A municipality is working to renew their outdated transportation plan, and seeks public participation in the process. Traditional town hall meetings and charettes have been held in the past, but the municipality experienced low participation beyond the typically active organized groups. The municipality decides to enhance their traditional consultation practices by setting up a PlaceSpeak topic page that contains all the same visuals, videos, presentations, surveys, and discussion questions as the in-person meetings. Citizens are able to fully participate in the process from their own home and on their own time. The attendance and participation rates on the PlaceSpeak topic page double that of the in-person consultations, without sacrificing dialogue quality. The overall result is that the municipality holds data of location-based participant input that can be used to inform the future development of the transportation plan, and participants are confident their voices have been heard in the process.

Marketplace

There are a number of public consultation platforms broadly addressing the need to bring the process online. Some focus on crowd-sourcing of ideas (eg. Uservoice, Ideavibes) and others on pre-visualization (Metroquest). Still others focus on collaborate planning (eg. Crowdbrite) and general public consultation (Engagement HQ, Delib). PlaceSpeak is differentiated from these applications in its Geo-identity approach to validation and its focus on aggregating civic-ally-engaged participants. PlaceSpeak is currently developing its API (application programming interface) which will allow other 3rd party websites to interact with PlaceSpeak, thus the companies in the competitive landscape are regarded as potential strategic partners.