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What is Citizenscape?

Citizenscape is a new web platform designed for local authorities who want to use the social web to involve online citizens in the democratic process.

It enables the use of existing social websites, such as community forums and sites like Facebook and Twitter, to connect to democratic and participatory tools such as ePetitions, webcasts or consultations.

With Citizenscape, you can combine your existing social media activity with a choice of online content and conversations created by people from your local communities and drawn from a variety of sources.

The shared tag cloud gives you an immediate picture of what your community is talking about and makes it really easy for you to listen to local online conversations.

You can also use your Citizenscape site to interact with your online citizens and make these online conversations an intrinsic part of your democratic engagement and communication activity.

The assumptions behind Citizenscape are simple:

  • Council's should not be building social networking sites themselves - there is already a lot of activity online. Local Authorities need to connect to that rather than starting from scratch
  • You need tools that reach out and exist on the sites that people are already visiting - not waste your time trying to get them to visit you
  • The social web encourages co-creation and participation - this makes it the right place to start to engage people in democratic debate

We are currently running a beta pilot programme called "The Virtual Town Hall" which launched in October 2009. We will be publishing ongoing results and feedback from this pilot throughout this year and you can read about the latest updates either on the blog or we are using #virtualTH on Twitter.

Virtual Town Hall Project Participants:

If you would like to follow the pilot, or would like more information on Citizenscape then please email info@public-i.info.