Release notes: Citizen Space v7.8

Citizen Space version 7.8 was rolled out to all customer sites in their standard upgrade windows in the week commencing 4 April 2022.

The Citizen Space release brings a third major update including a brand new response feature for Citizen Space Geospatial, as part of our commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. 

What’s new in v7.8?

Geo Select

The new feature is called Geo Select and provides a brand new response mechanism alongside dropping pins, drawing lines (like routes) and drawing polygons: respondents can now select their answer from a number of pre-loaded options from a map, rather than drawing or dropping a pin as their response.

This latest innovation from Delib expands the horizons of how maps can be used in engagement, both in terms of providing an easier, more informative experience for respondents and collecting more useful, quantitative data for public organisations. Everyone’s a winner.

A simpler choice mechanism

Delib’s ethos is to bring democracy to citizens wherever they are: on a train, a plane (preferably not an automobile unless they’re a passenger), at home, or at work. This new feature gives citizens a simple choice mechanism - clicking or tapping on a pre-loaded option on a map - rather than asking them to come up with an original answer. This further reduces barriers to participation and makes democratic access that little bit easier.

Different data possibilities

By giving users set options to choose from a map, we also open up the ability to connect maps with the rest of Citizen Space’s powerful survey functionality, like skip logic. Maps can now be used to route people through a survey - for example, a respondent can select which site they’d like to comment on in a Call for Sites exercise and be routed to questions about that particular site.

Geo Select also enables you to collect quantitative rather than qualitative data from a mapping activity. Admin users can pick which attribute (for example, the name of a ward or the ID of a site marked for development) of the selectable layer flows through to the reporting side of an activity. This quantitative data then behaves in much the same way as a multiple choice Radio Button question would, making for quick, easy analysis and versatile response data.