Who are Gocollaborate?
Gocollaborate is a Registered Company whose principal activity is the provision of digital platforms to help communities formulate their Neighbourhood Development Plans. Gocollaborate is an independent company separate from the Portreath Town Council and the NDP planning group.
Who owns Gocollaborate?
Although the directors and founders of Gocollaborate are all residents of Cornwall, none of them live in or have any financial or business interests, in Portreath. Gocollaborate came through the directors studying together on the Falmouth University Launchpad programme.
What is the relationship between Gocollaborate, Portreath Town Council and the NDP Group?
Portreath Town Council on the recommendation of the NDP Group, have contracted Gocollaborate to provide a web platform and other services, to maximise the community’s input into the NDP Reg14 Pre-submission consultation. This was deemed especially helpful at this time given the Covid restrictions.
Gocollaborate aims
Gocollaborate aims to transform how communities and generations work together to deliver better more sustainable places to live. It does this through offering an alternative to the traditional engagement processes which are slow and cumbersome and often dominated by a small number of people. This often results in many people who could add significant value to the plans not being engaged.
How does Gocollaborate do this?
Gocollaborate does this through providing simple to deploy, easy to access, easy to use, information rich, NDP focused, web platforms. Gocollaborate is available on desktop, tablet and mobiles, and is reached through: community groups, community champions, flyers, posters, and the power of social media.
What will Gocollaborate give?
Supported by electronic mapping data and providing links to all supporting data, the platform informs and enable communities to work together to agree plans. Gocollaborate does this through increasing the ability of the NDP groups to facilitate, encourage and manage the engagement, and reduce the work and costs involved and critically the time required.
Can people vote multiple times on the same policy/question?
Yes, but it is only the last entries made by each Registered User that is held and counted/reported. This allows Users to change their voting preferences at any time before the end of the consultation.
How can we be assured that people are not registering to vote multiple times?
The Gocollaborate platform has been built based upon people being honest. Software to validate email accounts is however in use. There are also checks that can be run to ensure the integrity of the final data set. It should also be noted that the NDP for Portreath can only be adopted following a Referendum run by the Cornwall Council Electoral Registration service.
What happens if I post comments about the plan on Facebook – will they be taken into account?
Given the sharing functionality there is no way that comments on Facebook can be collected. You are therefore strongly recommended if you want to comment, to register and comment through the Gocollaborate platform. This will enable you to be assured that your comments (and votes) are considered. It will also enable others in the community to see your comments and allow them to Like or Not-Like them, so that the NDP Group can get a feel for the support to the different views given.
How can I be assured that all the responses on the platform are passed to the NDP group?
Gocollaborate is an independent company and we will report in full to the NDP Group. Should the NDP Group or the Parish Council have concerns about the integrity of the data captured by and held on the system, or the processes for reporting, Gocollaborate will fully participate in any review process that is identified as required.
Why did I see posts suggesting the platform was not working?
We agreed at the outset with the NDP Group and through them the Parish Council, that we would use the NDP Pre-submission as a live-test of the platform. This reflected the timeline that the group and the council wanted to proceed on. As a result of this there were some bugs in the platform that were identified and which we worked with our development partner to remove.
Given the newness of the platform some members of the community also struggled to understand how to access it and how it worked. In response to this one to one training was provided to all who requested it and we now believe all who wanted to use the platform have been able to. If that is not the case further support can be accessed through sending us an email.