Research

Participedia is guided by the research question: What kinds of participatory processes work best, for what purposes, and under what conditions?

The strategy is simple: crowdsource information on democratic innovations from around the world and aggregate it into a public database that continually updates with new contributions. The Participedia platform is published under Creative Commons License and is accessible and editable by anyone.

For an in-depth explanation of the history, aspirations, theory, and analytical approach of Participedia, see 'The Participedia Project: An Introduction', by project founders, Archon Fung and Mark E. Warren. For information on how you can contribute to the project, please see our entry-writing guidelines.

For a brief introduction on how to use Participedia data, including analysis examples, please see our Data Guidebook.

Improving the quality of the Participedia dataset is an ongoing process, and we welcome feedback on any aspect of our data and how we enable its use. Real-time Participedia data is available at the following links:

If you do any analysis, data visualization, or other types of projects with this data, we would love to see it. Email us or share your project with us on Twitter.

The majority of research on democratic innovations and participatory processes that takes place around the world is not publicly available. These materials include datasets, codebooks, statistical software syntax or scripts, dissertations, conference papers, and practitioner evaluations and reports. The Participedia Dataverse provides a home for these materials in an accessible and organized data repository, archives the materials for long-term preservation, and generates standardized descriptions and identifiers to ease discovery and citation of the materials.

Researchers and practitioners can contribute to the Participedia Dataverse by depositing their research materials free of charge. Features of the Participedia data repository include:

  • metrics on the number of downloads of each dataset;
  • the ability to download datasets in multiple formats;
  • the ability to conduct data analysis right through the user interface without downloading data, since %sR%s is built into the user interface;
  • long-term preservation of data;
  • automatic assignment of digital object identifiers (DOIs) and other standards-compliant metadata to enable citation of datasets;
  • indexing of datasets in major search engines to help users find the data;
  • creation of digital fingerprints to enable authentication of datasets; and
  • an open API that allows data and metadata to be used by other web services.

Please direct any questions about contributing to Participedia Dataverse to [email protected].

Browse our Data Repository

Surveys are supplementary to Participedia’s current data and narrative descriptions and are intended to gain further insight on the outcomes and effects of cases.

The participant survey will capture the experience of those directly involved in a participatory process. It could be delivered by organizers at the location of a particular process, or completed by participants after the event.

The observer survey will capture views pertaining to the broader impact of a particular case. ‘Observers’ include practitioners, participants, or researchers who attended or have particular knowledge of a case.

Participedia's surveys are undergoing testing and will be available for download soon.