The Participedia Project: An Introduction

Participedia is an open-source, participatory knowledge tool that responds to a new global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world. The experiments are diverse and widespread, from the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly in Canada and the Oregon Citizens' Initiative in the United States to Participatory Budgeting in Brazil, deliberative forums in China, Panchayati Raj reforms in India, and citizen technology assessment in Denmark. Our knowledge of this rapidly expanding universe is shallow. The authors of this article, together with several others, have created the Participedia to respond to this deficit in knowledge. This article documents the development of the Participedia project to date. Participedia aims to be useful to scholars (and practitioners) as an open-source, real-time, cumulative qualitative and quantitative data repository about participatory and deliberative governance experiences. We believe that Participedia is the first effort in the social sciences to build a large data set through a method that is both crowd-sourced and structured to produce good quality, comparable information.