Introducing Community Portals - digital gateways to your neighborhoods
We are excited to share the long awaited launch of Community Portals on Citiesense. We will be kicking off the new year with private beta testing for select downtown communities.
https://community.citiesense.com/
Beta testing will be invite only for community portals, and small business owners will be the first group of community members we'll test the features with. Eventually these portals will be self-service and open to the public so that anyone can apply for membership and join any downtown community based on the plan that's right for you.
To give a better idea, the image below is an example of what the membership plans might look like for Long Island City's community portal. The platform enables downtown organizations like the Long Island City Partnership to embed a portal directly into their existing website experience.
How do Community Portals fit in our product roadmap and business model for Citiesense?
This is our first step toward Stage 2 of the business plan - a marketplace for local data that improves how communities make connections and form strong partnerships. Our product development and new releases to date have all been focused on features that position Citiesense as the best platform for managing local data about downtowns. We felt that this was important to start with because effective community engagement depends on providing access to accurate ground truthed information and locally sourced data. Stage 2 brings us to community engagement features that provide local data governance and improve access to information and partnerships.
While this Republic campaign will soon come to a close (please make sure you've made your final investment), we're looking forward to keeping all of our new investors up to date as we launch community portals in more downtowns and help people access local data to strengthen partnerships and collaborations. After all, the best way to improve cities has been and always will be through a combination of collaborative community participation and access to accurate information about on-the-ground conditions.