Participation Now emerges out of several years’ research on publics, participation and engagement with research. It is a new web resource that aims to imagine, animate and support a public who are interested in and/or involved with the fast-changing field of public participation. Participation Now is also an experimental public engagement initiative, which is working to test-out, develop, evaluate and report back on experimental and participative ways of involving people in a field of research and practice.

“It will be hard to address the large number of problems we face the 21st Century without public participation in public life. However, pick up a newspaper or follow a debate on Twitter and you’ll get a sense that many of our established public organisations and forms of democratic participation are in crisis, and that our most familiar public forums and forms of belonging are being questioned. It’s in this context that we are seeing…