Glossary

Definitions of the terms you’ll meet across CE Canvas — both community-engagement concepts and product-specific features.

Engagement concepts

IAP2 Spectrum — The five levels of public participation defined by the International Association for Public Participation, describing how much influence the community has over a decision: Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, Empower. Choosing a level is a promise about how you’ll use community input.

Inform — You keep the community informed. No influence over the decision is offered.

Consult — You seek feedback on options or a draft. Input is considered but the decision stays with the organisation.

Involve — You work with the community throughout so their concerns are consistently understood and reflected.

Collaborate — You partner with the community on each aspect, including developing options and identifying the preferred solution.

Empower — You place final decision-making in the community’s hands.

Decision space — What is genuinely open to community influence on this project, versus what is already fixed. Being honest about this up front is the foundation of trustworthy engagement.

Negotiables / Non-negotiables — The specific things the community can shape (negotiables) and the things that are already decided or constrained (non-negotiables). Documenting both prevents raising expectations you can’t meet.

Closing the loop — Reporting back to the community on what you heard, what you did with it, and why. A commitment to close the loop is part of running engagement ethically.

Stakeholders — The groups and individuals affected by, interested in, or able to influence the project. CE Canvas helps you map who needs to be heard and how.

Product terms

Organisation (Org) — Your workspace in CE Canvas. It holds your projects, team, branding, playbooks, templates, and settings.

Project — A single engagement initiative. It moves through the engagement journey from Context to Close & Learn and holds everything related to that initiative.

Project Context — The planning surface where you capture the foundations of the engagement (the decision, what’s open, what’s fixed, constraints, timing, sensitivities). EVA can extract these from your uploaded materials.

Engagement Canvas — A single-page visual planner that organises your engagement thinking into connected sections (context, people, delivery). Available in an engagement mode and a communications mode depending on the project type.

Engagement Plan — The full planning document generated alongside the canvas, organised into template-driven section groups. Its sections can be drafted with EVA, marked ready, or excluded.

Playbook — A reusable scaffold of methods, phases, and tasks for a type of engagement. Applying a playbook sets up the workflow for a new project.

Delivery Plan — Where planned engagement activities are organised for delivery.

Tasks — The operational to-do items for running your engagement. Tasks is a persistent surface (both a global “My Tasks” view and a per-project view), not a step in the journey.

Results — Community feedback and submissions brought into the project — uploaded, pasted, or synced from a connected source — for analysis.

Reporting — The stage where you turn analysed results into an outcomes report.

Close & Learn — The final stage of the journey, for evaluation and closing the loop with the community.

Success Plan — An organisation-level record of goals, pain points, desired outcomes, and success metrics used to guide onboarding.

EVA — The AI assistant built into CE Canvas. See Working with EVA.

Grounding — EVA’s practice of answering only from your project’s materials and the product documentation, rather than from general knowledge. See Responsible Use of AI.

Source chip / Confidence — Indicators shown on EVA’s drafts and answers: the source chip shows what the content is based on; confidence signals how well-grounded it is.

Needs input — A calm status meaning a field or section is missing information required to complete it — not an error.