iCITY COLLABORATION iCity Bringing the Community Together

Communities rely on strong relationships between both citizens and governments. The collaboration features of the iCity portal foster greater interaction between various groups and organizations within the municipality. Whether connecting buyers and sellers or allowing citizens to share input on the direction and future of the municipality, the iCity portal enables extensive collaboration between citizens, businesses and visitors.

The iCity portal lets citizens shape the content and issues of the municipal portal, collaborating to make the online presence of the city one that is driven as much by citizens as by government.

Some of the iCity Collaboration features include:

• Marketplace Classifieds
  With Marketplace Classifieds, community businesses and residents can advertise services and products for hire/sale. This service lets the citizens and businesses communicate directly with one another and post descriptions of items and pictures, as well as contact information and details. Additional features include the ability to conduct online auctions and bidding through the website for charity organizations or causes (similar to a small scale community driven eBay).
• Citizen Forum
  Municipalities are the broker of critical community discussions with Citizen Forum, and online discussions. Forums allow for threaded discussions on a range of topics in the community.
• Community Exchange
  The Community Exchange feature of the iCity portal is a chat or Instant Message application that allows citizens signed into the portal at the same time to communicate with each other. Citizens can interact in real-time about issues and topics confronting the community.
• Events Calendar
  iCity Events Calendar is an excellent method for posting community and municipal events to citizens, businesses and visitors. The Events Calendar can embrace a distributed model whereby other organizations in the community can publish events to increase the collaborative nature of the municipal portal, extending it to the various organizations that make up the community. The Events Calendar can also be integrated with the Recreational Programs and Events Module.
• Community Group Sites
  Community-based organizations can leverage the iCity portal as a communication and collaboration tool to increase their own marketing awareness initiatives in the municipality. Non-profit groups and businesses can create sub-websites within the municipal portal to keep the community and visitors informed on their services and products. This is an especially excellent feature for small businesses and non-profit organizations that often do not have the financial resources or technical know-how to launch their own website initiatives.
• Image Gallery
  The Image Gallery component allows the municipality and citizens to advertise through images. Using the gallery as a tourism tool to showcase the community to online visitors is an excellent method for driving new economic development. Citizens can also share their perceptions of the community through pictures to give new and fresh interpretations of the community and surrounding area.

Contact Imex Systems today to learn how the iCity portal uses community collaboration to strengthen the relationship between citizens, business, government and visitors.