Overview
Go Vocal provides a platform for governments to engage residents on communications, planning, neighborhoods, public safety, and sustainability initiatives. The platform captures feedback online and offline, streamlines engagement workflows, and includes features such as surveys, ideation, mapping, participatory budgeting, voting, and community monitoring.
Key people
In the news
- A yes from leadership can get one engagement project moving. A real culture of engagement changes how the whole organization works. Yesterday, in Leading through listening, Danene Sorace and Wietse Van Ransbeeck explored what has to happen between political leaders and practitioners for community input to genuinely influence decisions. But building that relationship takes time. And for practitioners, a big part of the work is making the case internally, creating shared expectations, and getting more of the organization behind
- Tomorrow, 200+ elected officials and practitioners will unpack why leadership support matters, what a strong approach to engagement looks like, and how it can pay off in better decisions and stronger trust. You can have a great engagement team and still struggle to make community input matter where decisions are made. And you can have leaders who genuinely want to listen, without giving their teams the space or mandate to do it well. That gap is exactly what we’ll unpack in 'Leading through listening', our upcoming masterclass with
- Low stakes for you, but meaningful for us.” That’s how Erik Waldbauer, CPC describes sharing feedback through Engage Allen. And it’s a pretty good reminder of why local participation matters: a few minutes from a resident can surface something city staff simply wouldn’t have known otherwise. 🎥 This is the first episode of On the Ground, our new video series featuring the people and projects shaping local participation. First stop: City of Allen, Texas, where Eric, Senior Engagement & Outreach Specialist, takes the hot seat to
- Yesterday’s MIXER community event came with a proper imec.istart Awards Show, celebrating the startups that raised the bar this year. Here are the 2026 winners… 🥁 🏆 Booming Team Award - Payflip Fastest-growing team. Nominees: VEOWARE SPACE, Cuez, nxgsat 🏆 World Domination Award - VEOWARE SPACE For the startup taking on the world and winning. Nominees: Go Vocal, Cuez 🏆 Impact Catalyst Award - ReVision Implant For real, measurable impact on people, planet or society. Nominees: Puray, Sencilia 🏆 Pay It Forward Award - Aloïs Echard
- In community engagement, getting the process right is only one part of the job. What happens around it matters just as much: when residents are brought in, how their input is used, and whether the people leading the organization are really behind the work. 👉 That leadership support can make a big difference. 👈 In our blog post, we share four practical ways to build it, with examples from local governments along the way. And later this month, we’ll pick up the same conversation in our "Leading through listening" masterclass with
- Leadership buy-in changes what community engagement can achieve. 👂 It gives teams the mandate to act on what they hear ⚖️ It helps resident input carry weight in decision-making 🔄 It helps close the loop, so communities can see what their participation changed But what does good leadership actually look like in practice? And if you’re a practitioner, how do you get your leaders on board? Former Lancaster Mayor Danene Sorace and Go Vocal CEO Wietse Van Ransbeeck will tackle both sides in our upcoming masterclass, with
- Tiny design choices can ripple into major democratic consequences. For years the problem was the same everywhere: residents say a lot, decision-makers have very little time to hear it. AI changes that equation. Thousands of comments can now be turned into something a council or minister can actually read. But there's a catch. Someone, or something, has to decide what survives the compression. Beth Simone Noveck's new essay puts it well: 1,000 contributions ultimately become a one-pager, and that one-pager is not neutral. Which
- What does responsible AI in citizen participation actually look like? OECD Public Governance just pointed to one example: Go Vocal’s work with Cambridge City Council. 🙌 In its new report on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, the OECD analyzes 50 real-world examples of how AI is being used in participation processes. One of them is Cambridge’s Design Code consultation, where our AI-powered Insights helped the team make sense of community input. The OECD classifies the case as an example of AI for
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