Participedia

Participedia describes itself as a global crowdsourcing platform for researchers, activists, practitioners and anyone interested in public participation. Its aim is to build a shared, comparable body of evidence about how participatory and deliberative processes — citizens' assemblies, participatory budgeting, deliberative polls, online consultations, community planning — are designed, how they work and what they achieve, so that scholars can study them systematically and practitioners can learn from one another.

Participedia was founded in 2009 by the political scientists Archon Fung (Harvard Kennedy School) and Mark E. Warren (University of British Columbia), who introduced it to the research community in 'The Participedia Project: An Introduction' (2011). The article argued that the study of democratic innovations lacked a common database of cases comparable to those available for elections or legislatures, and proposed a wiki-based platform to which researchers and practitioners would contribute. After a two-year SSHRC Partnership Grant (2011–2013), the project has been funded since 2015 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through two consecutive Partnership Grants of CAD 2.5 million each (2015–2021 and 2021–2026), totalling CAD 5 million. Phase 1, directed by Warren at UBC, focused on participatory governance. Phase 2, launched in June 2021 and directed by Bonny Ibhawoh at McMaster University, organised research clusters on participatory and deliberative governance, human and political rights, democratic accountability, democratic representation, democracy across borders, and digital communication.

• Database. In late 2026 the platform listed about 2,440 cases, 400 methods and 886 organisations from some 160 countries, organised in thematic collections. Entries follow a structured template recording purpose, participants, selection method, decision-making, funding and outcomes, which supports comparative coding.
• Open access. The content is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) and can be edited by registered users, with publication subject to approval by administrators.
• Research and teaching. The network supports research clusters, a teaching programme that uses case-writing in university courses, and datasets derived from the platform.
• Design. In Phase 1 the platform's design and technology team operated out of the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

Participedia, which describes itself as a Canadian-based, internationally collaborative nonprofit, is an academic project funded primarily by a public research council; in Phase 1 its technology team was also supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It does not run participatory processes for governments, which reduces direct conflicts of interest, although many contributors are practitioners or organisations describing their own work.

• Uneven quality. Because entries are crowdsourced, they vary greatly in detail and reliability; some are written by organisers with an interest in presenting their processes favourably.
• Selection bias. Cases that are documented tend to be those that were completed and publicised, and those in countries and languages well represented among contributors; failed or abandoned processes are likely under-recorded.
• Comparability. Structured fields help, but outcomes such as 'influence on policy' are hard to code consistently across very different contexts.
• Dependence on grants. Long-term maintenance of a large open database depends on renewed research funding.