Empower and promote local organisations with Civis
Civis is the brand new and latest version of the Axiell Community Information module.
The digital citizen requires easy access to the information they need to make their lives more enjoyable or productive – in their jobs, their family lives and in their leisure activities.
Libraries already make a valuable contribution to the economic, social and personal well-being of the community, and Civis can help them do even more. Wherever your citizens can access the Web – from home, office or library – they will get relevant topical information about local groups, whether they be societies, charity and welfare bodies, or local government departments.
Civis has been developed as a standalone system to provide a fully web-based application that is fully compliant with e-government standards. In particular, it has been designed to enable local authorities to meet their IEG obligations under Priority Outcome G2:
‘Empowering and supporting local organisations , community groups and clubs to create and maintain their own information online'
Civis supports e-Gov and e-GIF standards such as the import and export of data in XML format, and it maintains both simple and more sophisticated qualified Dublin Core formats.
It is a standalone application which runs on a Windows 2000 server and provides facilities to maintain, search and browse organisation and event records which contain information of interest to the local community. It supports varying levels of user permissions, privacy and data protection.
There are two main record types – Organisation and Event. Subsidiary records hold Contact and Venue Addresses, meaning that address details can be re-used and held relationally to the main records. Data includes accessibility (disability) icons, opening times, how to get in touch, and a link to map applications such as Multimap via the postcode.
The Public interface provides simple and clear web pages where users can search for, and then add and amend, records about Organisations and Events, if they have the right permission.
Radio buttons are used where possible, and use of the mouse is not essential. Links to websites and attachments are supported.
Searching is simple, and defaults to a Google-like screen where the user can just type in one or more word and click, or select a subject or category and see all relevant records.
An Advanced Search tab is always displayed for more experienced users, along with other search tabs such as browsing Organisations alphabetically by Name or Events by Date.
Civis can be configured locally to automatically show public users ‘the most popular searches', ‘the most useful searches', ‘all events this week', or ‘all events this month' (for example). This feature can be switched on or off as required to highlight local and topical events and news.
Staff can also add and update stylesheets , update letter templates and create templates for printed directories and reports in rtf format.
Staff can arrange via license to download and use the SeamlessUK synonym taxonomy, or alternatively they can load a local taxonomy of synonyms, including ‘See Also' and ‘Use For' references. An optional utility called the Taxonomy Manager handles synonyms and the hierarchy of geographical data which is required to support ‘Get me the nearest' searching via a clickable map (if implemented).
Civis also has an online utility to display, sort, cumulate, print and export the various statistics and record counts, for use by management information staff and managers.
So, empower your local citizens by implementing Civis!
