PARI, in 2020, joined Participedia, a global community sharing knowledge and stories about public participation and democratic innovations.
Participedia is an open-sourced, online research tool and publishing platform for articles and case studies of real life examples of participatory democracy. It was set up by North American academics in response to a perceived gap in data collection on the rapidly developing global phenomena of participatory democracy.
Created for the use of academics, journalists, consultants and even government organisations, to either view or contribute content, Participedia is the brain-child of professors Archon Fung of Harvard and Mark Warren of the University of British Columbia. Fung and Warren explain their aims:
The goal of Participedia is to be useful to scholars (and practitioners) as an open-sourced, real-time, cumulative qualitative and quantitative data repository about participatory and deliberative governance experiences. More broadly, 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 relatively high quality, comparative information. It is an early effort to import a method now common in other domains and disciplines into the social sciences.[1]
