PlaceSpeak advances public consultation to a whole new level by enabling evidence-based decision-making by allowing citizens to influence the process in an open, safe, secure and transparent manner.

 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?

Developed by PlaceSpeak Inc., PlaceSpeak is revolutionizing the online public consultation business. Public consultation is required broadly as part of the democratic process. Governments at all levels directly or indirectly require consultation on a range of issues, most of which are geographically defined. PlaceSpeak taps into that need to consult and adds value by generating verifiable data to support public policy development and local decision-making. PlaceSpeak takes the guesswork out of online consultation.

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.

Business Model

PlaceSpeak’s mission is to empower people everywhere to provide their verifiable feedback on public consultations, and we believe the best way to achieve that mission is by combining the values of a non-profit with the flexibility and innovation of a tech startup. We’re a new kind of company: a “social enterprise,” using the power of business for social good. Like most companies, PlaceSpeak has a business model that allows us to grow rapidly and be financially self-sustaining, providing thousands of people with a free public consultation platform. But unlike many companies, our business is social good.

How We Fund PlaceSpeak

We fund our free public participation platform by charging proponents of consultations a license fee. We do not sell advertising (like Facebook and Google) and we do not sell our participants’ personal information (like market research firms). We recognize that privacy is mission critical. We charge community groups and non-profit organization 1/10th of the cost of the Standard subscription. We do charge because human behaviour dictates that people take things more seriously when they pay for them than when they do not. Of course, citizen participants engage for free!