The Innova Participation Platform

The Innova Integra Participation Platform is a flexible and adaptable platform for planning, executing and evaluating different types of participatory processes and activities. It is our core system for developing domain-specific solutions for participatory processes.

The Participation Platform is a modular system that is available as a white label customisable base system with a set of core functionalities. These functionalities can be tailored and extended for specific tasks and use cases. The examples below are mainly taken from a customised solution, named CITIZENS-SAY, which was integrated as part of the Nature4Cities research project and is currently being developed into a commercial prototype.

The Participation Platform can provide functionalities for uploading and maintaining document and reference collections and for linking information with and into popular social media platforms. The core functionalities of the platform however are the ability to create and execute participation workflows. In CITIZENS-SAY, these workflows are managed at the level of municipalities in European countries, and workflows can be accessed by thematic searches or via a map view.

Participatory workflows are linear processes that consist of one or more activities. The types of activities that can be used depend on the domain and configuration of the platform. For CITIZENS-SAY, we are providing a wide range of activities including an emailing activity, text and multimedia presentation activities, live conference call and online chat activities, joint document and joint map editing activities, polls, item card sorting and grouping activities, a feature-rich online survey creation activity and activities that integrate other components of the Nature4Cities project.

These activities can be scheduled so that they start at a particular time (e.g. the time an email invitation is sent) and are available for a specified time period (e.g. the duration for which an online survey is available). All activities are managed and presented through a single user interface so that there is no need to switch between different platforms to achieve tasks.

Activities can also be nested within other activities. This allows us to arrange a set of activities that can then be worked on during a video conference event or an online chat session. The platform activities can then not only be used by all conference event participants, they also update for all participants in real-time, enabling e.g. collaborative document editing and live views of online polls offered during an event.

The Participation Platform stores all data gathered as part of a participation workflow in a system-internal database; workflow owners and editors can view results and updates to activities live and in real-time as they arrive in the system. The platform has functionalities for one-off exports of data for statistical purposes, exposes a simple to use and standards-based REST API for secure data provisioning and lets workflow owners and editors export the complete set of activity outcomes for a workflows as a single structured office document for further presentation and processing.

The platform has developed with localisation facilities for user-facing parts of the system, so that participants can be engaged in their preferred language.

We have integrated speech-to-text transcription, text analysis and sentiment analysis functionalities into the platform, so that the system can transcribe video conference event discussions, analyse them to extract key entities of the discussions and determine the likely emotional response of participants to the identified key entities (currently in beta, availability limited to a set of supported languages).

If you would like to learn more about our participation platform, please get in touch for a personal tour through our system features.