Citizen Space Workspaces structure

Citizen Space uses Workspaces as the underlying structure to manage internal access to activities and response data. You can think of the Workspace structure as similar to a folder structure on your computer.

Adding your first Workspace and creating a Workspace structure is one of the initial set-up tasks after a Citizen Space has been deployed, and it's worth doing a bit of thinking before you do.

Consider the following with regard to your Workspace structure:

• Users exist within one or more Workspaces in Citizen Space, and any activities they add will also be within those Workspaces.
• Access to those activities and their response data is restricted to users in the same Workspace (plus Site Admin users).
• The Workspace name appears in the URL of every activity, as follows: https://example.citizenspace.com/workspace-name/activity-title

Top tips for naming your Citizen Space Workspaces

• Site admins can add Workspaces with capital letters, but they will always appear in the activity URL as lower case, with hyphens between words. For example, a Workspace called 'Parks Service' will appear in a URL as follows: https://example.citizenspace.com/parks-service/activity-title
• Because the Workspace is included in the URL, it is a good idea to keep the Workspace title short if possible. It is unlikely that members of the public will scrutinise the words in the URL or worry about whether they exactly match a department or team name in your organisation. For example, could the Workspace be called 'Parks' instead of 'Parks and Recreation Service'?
• Following on from this, it can be a good idea to give your Workspaces more generic names such as 'planning' and 'schools', rather than committing to exactly matching the department names and structures within your organisation. This is because department names and structures may change. This happens more often than one would imagine.
• We advise against using special characters in a Workspace name. It can be done, (for example '&' is sometimes used) but a symbol will always be replaced by either a hyphen or other letters in the URL. For example, a Workspace called 'Parks & Recreation' will appear in the URL as follows: https://example.citizenspace.com/parks-recreation/activity-title
• Site admins can edit the name of a Workspace, but this edit will not change the Workspace name in the URL. This is because changing the URL will break any in-progress responses or save and return links. If you have added a Workspace incorrectly, and it doesn't yet have any assigned users or activities, simply delete the Workspace and create a new one.

Our table of internal user types shows how roles within the Workspace structure influences what users can do and what data they can see.