Participation Now, new from the Open University

[Nick.Mahony]

Dear Wisdom Council team

We wanted to let you know that Wisdom Council is featured in a new Open University web resource called Participation Now, which has recently gone live with the aim of supporting informal learning, debate, research and innovation across the increasingly diverse field of public participation practice.

You will find Participation Now here: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/participation-now?seeall=1

Participation Now is aimed at practitioners, students, citizens and researchers interested or involved in developments in this increasingly important area. We’d therefore love to hear what you think of the new site and whether you’d like to be more closely associated with this project as it develops in the months ahead.

At this early stage of this project there are three main ways you can become more involved:

1. The easiest is to simply provide us with the name and email address of a contact person who is linked to OpenIdeo. We can then add these contact details to the other information we have posted on Participation Now about your initiative. Doing this will allow users of Participation Now to reach you and, over time, we hope adding contact details will also allow for a social network of innovators in this area to begin to develop. If your initiative also has a Twitter or Facebook account please let us know.

2. Let us know what you think of Participation Now and/or about any other public participation initiatives you think we should include in our constantly evolving collection. We recognize that Participation Now will only work if it’s built in collaboration with the practitioners, students, citizens and researchers who are interested and involved in this field, so we’d really like to hear your views on what we should be doing to develop this new web resource in the months ahead.

3. The aspiration is that Participation Now will become a platform that can be used by practitioners, students, citizens and researchers to debate key issues, problems and challenges related to public participation and share experiences of new and emerging practices. So we are also very interested to hear about one or two of the specific issues, concerns, problems or challenges you see as being important in your own domain of thinking and practice. We can then use some of this information to shape the development of the Participation Now site.

We are planning in the months ahead to produce short audio podcasts and provide links to resources and organisations, live events and more. If you are a Twitter user and want to keep up with on-going developments you can do this via @NowParticipate.

We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully working with you to develop this new initiative. When responding to this email, please reply to: Particip...@open.ac.uk

You can keep up with developments via Twitter by following: @NowParticipate

Best regards,

Nick Mahony and Hilde Stephansen

Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK


Nick Mahony is a Research Fellow, whose research focuses on contemporary public participation and emerging forms of popular democratic culture

Hilde Stephansen is a Research Associate, whose research focuses on the formation of publics through various communication practices
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