Here's Participedia. That's right: an encyclopedia of participatory and deliberative practice

This isn’t new, but we’ve very happy to have come upon it - and even happier to share it. Participedia was begun by some Canadian academic-activists in 2013, on the following brief:

Participedia harnesses the power of collaboration to respond to a recent global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world.

We live in a world in which citizens of most countries are asking for greater involvement in collective decisions. Many governments, non-governmental organizations, and even some corporations are responding by experimenting with ways to increase public participation.

Hundreds of thousands of participatory processes occur each year in almost every country in the world. They are addressing a wide variety of political and policy problems. And they often supplement and sometimes compete with more traditional forms of politics, such as representative democracy.

Participedia responds to these developments by providing a low-cost, easy way for hundreds of researchers and practitioners from across the globe to catalogue and compare the performance of participatory political processes.

And that’s exactly what happens, with an amazing richness built up over the last five years. You can dive through categories of cases, methods or organisations, or you can refine your search with precision.

If you’re interested in “Type of Interaction among Participants”, you are given 40-odd cases that focus on story-telling, or 57 on formal testimony, even 9 on acting/drama.

If you want to Raise public awareness, on a Local (e.g. Neighbourhood, City/Town, Metropolitan Area) level, you can find 21 items here.

And so on. We’ve already picked out some stuff new to us - for example the Wisdom Councils/Civic Councils of Austria, or Australia’s People Policy. Or the six-hundred year old participatory democracy practiced by the Oromo nation in the horn of Africa, called Gadaa.

More on Participedia here. And if you’d like to contribute your own participatory practice, or report on a case study, go here.