About

 

Claim your Place. Speak your Mind

PlaceSpeak connects residents with their address online so they can voice their opinions in real life.

 

What is PlaceSpeak?

PlaceSpeak is a location-based community consultation platform designed to advance public participation. It connects residents with issues taking place in their own neighbourhoods to promote meaningful dialogue on local issues. Once validated, residents can connect with local issues to keep informed, speak their mind and know that they are making an impact. At the same time, we provide decision makers with the confidence that they are receiving feedback from the right places.

Our goal is to bring ‘power back’ to the people, but do so in conjunction with proponents. This will ensure that the directions and the decisions that we are making in land use policy in particular are made on an informative basis. This is what consultation is all about.

 

How do I claim my place?

We use a simple secure 3-step digital identity verification process to authenticate you to your residential address. Once validated, you can connect with local issues to keep informed, speak your mind and know that you’re making an impact.

 

What Makes PlaceSpeak Unique

We provide better tools for online public consultation that overcome many of the current shortcomings of traditional methods. Our unique feature is our emphasis on geo-authentication. In simple terms, we focus on your geographic location, so that in whatever form consultation takes—whether it’s polls and surveys or discussion forums—it’s based on your neighbourhood and your place. There is nothing else out there online that ties your residential location with consultation.

 

Why should I get involved?

Because you care about your community. PlaceSpeak transforms the way people interact with local decision-makers. For the first time, it will be possible to genuinely communicate based on where you live.

 

Why is Geo-Verification Important?

Depending on the nature of the consultation, proponents want to know that the people that they are talking to are the ones that are affected. If it’s a real-estate development that is going to affect people in the immediate vicinity, the developer will want to know if they are hearing from residents in the immediate vicinity. Our location-based technology enables and encourages inclusive, informed citizen participation in location-based policy development and decision-making.

By connecting resident’s online identities to the real world, PlaceSpeak enables people to be able to genuinely affect outcomes of decisions in their neighborhoods. When members register they are geo-verified as being residents of their neighbourhood. By signing up and being verified, our residential users have proven that they are real people. Additionally, as participants are authenticated by the platform; their comments are not anonymous. As a result, there is a disincentive to spam or post unproductive comments.  So when people connect with topic proponents, the consultations will be more meaningful.

 

What about my Privacy?

Only you can see your profile. You alone control your public visibility settings. To others, you are a green dot on a map. When you connect with an issue, you confirm that you live within the relevant local area. PlaceSpeak is not funded by advertising and we will never sell or disclose your information.

 

 

PlaceSpeak is a start-up being incubated by New City Ventures in Vancouver, B.C., Canada with the support of the NRC/ IRAP, MITACS-Accelerate Program and SBIP Small Business Intership Program.