The 2.8.0 release of Council Platform adds "Find your councillors" functionality to sites.
This work was commissioned by Rochford Council and becomes available to all subscribers to use at no extra cost.
Rochford are keen to move some of their democratic services functionality into their main Council Platform site in an effort to simplify their site's user experience.
This functionality works by:
- Uploading a data set in the form of a CSV file into the Platform's admin system. This follows a simple template format.
- Integration with the Ordnance Survey's APIs to:
- Retrieve a list of properties for a user inputted postcode.
- Obtain the "Unique Property Reference Number" for the user selected property.
- Find the ward the property is in.
- Returning the Councillors that match the resulting ward.
This functionality paves the way for further geographic search based functionality (i.e. "Find your nearest school", "Find your nearest library" etc) to be added to sites.