OpenConsult is a draft open standard for publishing data about public consultations. The standard was initiated in December 2015 as a joint project of the Province of British Columbia and PlaceSpeak.com, under the umbrella of the BCDevExchange program.
The current version is discussion draft 1
.
This is a standard that governments, and other organizations that regularly consult with the public, can use to share information about upcoming, ongoing, and completed consultations. This is a standard that citizens' groups, other governments, and businesses can use to create services that recieve data from multiple consulting organizations for re-publication, re-purposing and research.
The OpenConsult standard consists of a core dataset of consistently named and formatted fields (aka columns) with one entry (row) per consultation. Those required fields are described in the requirements document, as well as recommended and optional fields that can be published alongside them.
In addition to the core consultations dataset, there are three optional supplementary datasets, providing additional information about public events, documents, and status changes that might be associated with a given consultation. Each of these optional datasets also consists of required, recommended and optional fields. These optional datasets are linked back to the core dataset by the use of a unique consultation ID field.
For example, in the core consultation dataset there could be one (and necessarily only one) consultation with the ID "2016999". Then in the optional documents dataset there could be 4 associated .PDF documents described, each with "2016999" as the value in their respective ConsultationId
fields.
This data structure has been proposed because
The standard's requirements are described in these files:
Each set of requirements includes fields that are required, recommended, and optional fields:
Organizations publishing to the standard are free to publish any additional fields alongside those described in this standard, so long as those fields are clearly not covered by one of the fields described in the standard. Organizations doing so are encouraged to submit those fields as candidates for inclusion.
Sample Data is provided in the SampleData
folder demonstrating how real-world data (derived from EngageBC and PlaceSpeak.com) could be formatted to fit the standard. Note that not all fields are required, so not all data being published to the standard will have a structure identical to this sample.
PlaceSpeak.com provides a feed machine-readable feed of all of their public consultations, formatted in JSON and structured according to the draft openconsult standard.
The feed is located at https://www.placespeak.com/api/consultations/.
It currently implements the "core" dataset requirements.
Initial draft for discussion being shared, feedback being collected on the basic structure of the dataset, as well as on the field details.
If you have opinions about the standard please submit an issue here, or get in touch at hugh@hughstimson.org | justin.hewitt@gov.bc.ca.
Detailed guidance around licenses is available here
OpenConsult by the Province of Britich Columbia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.