Electoral democracy is under increasing strain. Centrist governments are no longer able to govern their disaffected citizens while populism's disdain for mediating institutions and technocratic elites gives rise to autocrats who promise something better. Faced with these threats, communities test new forms of collective processes to empower themselves. Participedia addresses the urgent need to understand the impact of these countervailing phenomena by mapping the recent exponential growth of participatory innovations globally. Participedia's open-source, multilingual platform brings activists and scholars together to crowdsource local knowledge of participation on a global scale. For example, the Covid-19 Response Collection documents participatory initiatives that address the Coronavirus pandemic, including forms that range from protests and volunteering to hackathons and DIY tracking apps.

Participedia embraces the idea that a platform about participation should itself be participatory. Grounded in feminist human-computer interaction theory, Participedia's design and technology team engages a multidisciplinary network of collaborators, embedding values of equity into the design research and platform. The team built an open-source codebase from the ground up [github.com/participedia](https://github.com/participedia), focusing on student mentorship and creating employment opportunities for women and LGBTQ+, who are underrepresented in the tech sector. Participedia.net is designed at the [Studio for Extensive Aesthetics](https://amberfj.com/studio/), Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Links: https://participedia.net

Participedia is currently supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and international partner organizations.

Participedia is a crowdsourcing platform for researchers, activists, practitioners, and anyone interested in public participation and democratic innovations. The platform was collaboratively designed by an international research partnership to connect and bolster their work on participatory democracy with publicly crowdsourced knowledge. Participedia.net was founded by Dr. Archon Fung, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Dr. Mark E. Warren, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and is guided by a set of standing committees.