Participedia, a collaborative effort to identify, document, and learn from the hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement occurring in governments, communities, and organizations throughout the world, launched a new open-source, open-edit website, Participedia.net, on June 3.
The crowdsourcing platform gives everyone the ability to share knowledge and information. The resulting catalogue provides the information necessary for scholars, practitioners, and members of the public to understand diverse channels of citizen engagement and their contribution to democracy and governance.
As part of the catalogue, 20 Coady graduates have shared their experiences through the publishing of case studies on the website. Of these 20, 14 are from women graduates including Tricia Akakpo (Diploma in Development Leadership, 2015) who submitted her work on The Women’s Advisory Platform: Promoting Gender-inclusive Governance in Juaboso District (Ghana) and Barbara Maigari (Certificate in Citizen-Led Accountability: Strategies & Tools, 2016) who submitted Citizen Observers: Social Accountability in Nigeria’s Judicial Sector
Participedia.net has published 2,000 entries to date that have been collectively written and edited by close to 3,000 users, and accessed by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. The research project has grown into a global network of more than 50 co-investigators and collaborators from partner institutions spanning six continents.
One of these collaborators is Coady teaching staff member Julien Landry. This week Julien will be gathering with other Participedia partners and collaborators at the Participedia Partners Conference at Institute for Development Studies to further work on the project.
Participedia is a resource for anyone interested in the new forms of civic engagement and democratic innovation being developed around the world. From academics, to practitioners and engaged citizens, Participedia’s community shares a common goal: to document and understand new forms of governance and community-empowerment in all places and at all scales. On Participedia, anyone can collaboratively document and share cases, methods, and organizations related to public participation.