In the July release of Citizen Space, Delib has included a new feature a number users have requested – the ability to control who can publish or retract consultations on your hub. Not only that, but they have made improvements to the aggregator, the new PDF embedder and a number of other things, to make your lives that bit easier.
What’s new
Control over publishing and retracting consultations
Image of consultation dashboard showing the new pop up window to explain when publishing and retracting consultations has been restricted to site admins only Citizen Space can now be set up to restrict permission for publishing or retracting consultations to site or department admins only. As an organisation, this can give you more control over the consultations that go live and can help you to supervise any consultations being retracted after they have been published.
The default setting for permission to publish will remain as it is currently, with all consultation owners able to publish and retract their consultations – however, if you would like to turn the restriction on, just ask your account manager.
Pro Tip: Citizen Space has a number of ways to quality control consultations. Here are some suggestions and features:
- For complete control over publishing: use the new feature and restrict the ability to publish consultations to just site or department admins.
- For some finer-grained control: At PublicVoice, we QA all of our work with other members of the team. You could set up a number of trained members of staff in each department who can QA users’ consultations before they go live.
- For free-range use: If you want to allow all consultation owners to publish their own consultations, you could encourage them to use the ‘share preview link’ feature to obtain sign-off prior to publishing. Citizen Space also enables users to print off consultations or email the link of their consultation to department or site admins for checking.
- For best-practice consultation: We think Citizen Space works best when an organisation has embedded their consultation standards across all users, so you can trust that each consultation owner will be following tried and tested methods and publishing high-quality consultations. This saves the time and effort of one team having to check all consultations prior to publishing.
What else?
Aggregator: Delib have improved their aggregator! The aggregator shows you all the public consultations run on Citizen Space. So if, for example, you’re running a consultation on say, buses or controlled parking zones, you can look on the aggregator for inspiration from your peers who have done the same.
Document extensions: New versions of MS Office documents displayed with long file extensions when uploaded to Citizen Space, Delib have fixed this to make this look nicer for you and your respondents.
Tidying up: As usual, they have fixed bugs, done some tidying and rectified some pesky browser-specific issues to improve your experience, and that of your respondents, when using Citizen Space.