Application FAQs

What is the propella.civic application?

propella.civic is an application developed on the Microsoft Power BI platform, that is hosted on propella.ai's Azure cloud environment.  The application has a Javascript 'application wrapper' that allows users to connect it via a publicly accessible URL (https://civic.propella.ai).

Each propella.civic customer has their own instance of the application that contains the assets and precincts that they have defined and provided to propella.ai to host within their propella.civic application.  Access to the council instance of propella.civic is via single sign-on, using the same credentials (username and passwords) used to login to Microsoft apps within the council network.

How does the Single Sign-On (SSO) in the application work?

propella.civic uses a Microsoft Office 365 based single sign-on (SSO) based authentication system to sign-in and access the application. A reputable industry identity and access management platform -  Auth0 ( learn more about Auth0's security compliance) - has been integrated with propella.civic to provide the identity services. Users validate their Office 365 credentials with Microsoft's Identity Platform and the user's identity information is passed on to propella.civic via Auth0. This identity information is used by the application to validate access only.

Since all authentication verification happens within Microsoft's Identity Platform, any security best practices established by your organisation like multi-factor authentication are automatically applied while you sign into propella.civic.

What information is store in our system about the users?

The only information that is passed on to propella.civic is the basic profile details of the user. Each user will be prompted to provide consent to the information the app would retain. The consent prompt provides details about the information that the application requires. This is a one time prompt as long as the permissions that are required by the application does not change. If a new set of permissions are required by the application, the user would be prompted again to provide consent. 

propella.ai currently shares a Microsoft tenancy (and an office!) with a company called BlueRock (a Melbourne-based professional services and advisory firm).  We have leveraged the Microsoft partnership status of BlueRock Digital (a BlueRock entity) to get the propella.civic application certified by Microsoft.  That is why 'BlueRock Digital' is referenced next to the "blue tick" indicating the application is certified by Microsoft.

The profile information that is captured as part of consent process looks like this below.  These are the only details that is stored in Auth0 and can be accessible by the propella.civic application.

What data is stored within the application?

The following core data sets are currently stored with application:

1. Geo-spatial polygons provided by propella.civic customers, and associated metadata for each polygon (e.g. name, address, main category, sub-category, etc.)
2. De-identified human movement/mobility data (refer here for more details) that has been filtered/intersected for council polygons, and derived metrics and associated transformed data that is used to analyse asset/precinct usage.
3. Standard open-source geo-spatial data to assist with visualisation of asset usage (e.g. LGA polygons to visualise visitor home locations)

Where is the data stored?

Our application and the supporting data lake and databases all reside within propella.ai's Azure cloud platform.  These services all reside within Microsoft Azure's Australia East location - all data is stored and maintained within Australia.