ParentVoice

Parent Voice is a Hampshire, England-wide network of parents and carers of children and young people with additional needs aged 0-19. Parent Voice provides local information and advice, newsletters and a comprehensive events calendar.

About Parent Voice
The aim of the Parent Voice charity is to provide families with the right information at the right time, according to need, and to enable families to have their say about local services. This includes helping parents and carers to influence the way existing services are developed and to identify where services are needed but do not currently exist.

Through the website, you can share your experiences and benefit from the knowledge gained by other parents/carers. Parent Voice keeps users informed of activities and events that are happening in the Hampshire area and how to access these activities through a weekly update sent by mail or email depending on the user's preference.

The site receives over 50,000+ hits per month. It has revolutionized the way that information about help, advice and services is disseminated and searched. A survey by the local government authority indicated very positive feedback from users.

Parent Voice was built and skinned by Prescient Software.

Audience
Parent Voice's target audience consists of parents and carers of children and young people with additional needs aged 0-19. Parent Voice tries to bring these people together into a community of support by sharing information about local events, information and services.

Why is SMW used?
The site is built around Semantic MediaWiki, which allows users to find information about services and organizations quickly and easily. Semantic Result Formats and Semantic Drilldown are also used to make browsing and displaying this information more user friendly.

Users are encouraged to contribute news and organization information as well as submitting information about a variety of events. These events are then displayed on color-coded calendars.

Other extensions used

 * Semantic Maps
 * Semantic Internal Objects
 * Widgets