How do you define participatory practice?

View this email in your browser

Hi! It’s Simon.

How do we define participation? What boundaries do we set with that definition? And who do we exclude with it?

Participatory practice as a strategic approach in journalism has been on the rise. From the superficial – like curated hashtags – to the deep – like communities as producers and directors of journalism. But what are the limitations of this modern participatory practice? And how do we move beyond them?

These are questions artists creating participatory experiences have been asking for at least a decade. Here's an exchange (edited for brevity) between David Goldenberg and Patricia Reed published in Fillip Magazine in 2008:

Goldenberg: ...What concerns me, in regards to participation, is the often diluted or weak understanding of participatory practice (i.e., types of practice which are participatory practices in name only)....In other words, the art industry, including art practitioners who simply use the audience in their work, adopts a form of participation, that is...used by advertising companies to sell products. This form of participatory practice is simply a strategy for an audience to consume art without a qualitative or meaningful engagement with it, or, put another way, offers a form that does not actually change any aspect of the art system.

Reed: Yes...This leads me to a most basic question that needs to be asked, namely; what constitutes an act, a gesture, of participation in the first place?...This follows that participation, speaking in the context of contemporary art, should be understood as comprising not only a “hands-on,” “active” interaction, but also includes exit, indifference, non-participation, and forms of spectatorship.

Goldenberg: From my perspective, participatory practice is not just about shaping consensus, acquiring free labour, or seducing an audience into a practice or way of thinking, but recognizing the parameters that have been mapped out for participatory engagement.

Reed: Right...I think it would be key, then, to render the ideology of a project transparent, I mean vulnerable, susceptible for intervention at its very foundation. The other problematic within this way of working is how to escape the documentary “trap” of such practices—its modes of aestheticization and presentation to the public.

So while we debate our ideological commitment to participatory practice and it's ramifications, we have to ground these questions in our work. The most glaring question to journalists building sustainable business then becomes "How do we measure the value of participation?" Our one feature for this week seeks to address just that. And if there's anything you'd like to see in GroundSourced, let us know.

Illustration by Lukas Kouwets for Membership Puzzle Project

Lifetime membership value, or what is participation “worth” & how should we measure it?

Membership Puzzle Project commissioned Joe Amditis of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University to examine measuring the value of membership and participation. Here is a taste of what he found:

Formulas for calculating the lifetime value of a subscriber are relatively straightforward. Membership, on the other hand, can be much more complicated. There are certain core aspects of membership that are demonstrably valuable to an organization and its members, but it’s much harder to quantify what they’re worth and to nail down a dollar amount. A lot of it has to do with the difficulty in calculating the value of participation, which can be a huge part of membership organizations...

...When people donate to a charity or a good cause, they don’t typically expect to see any financial return on their investment — or any other kind of tangible return, aside from the satisfaction of knowing (and perhaps letting other people know) that they did a good deed.

Membership, on the other hand, is neither pure exchange nor pure altruism. Instead, it occupies a kind of middle ground that combines elements of both in order to create something even larger.

Membership allows an organization to take the economic return of a transactional relationship and the sense of purpose you get from an altruistic exchange and combine them with a participatory element. When done correctly, you get what Heimans and Timms call the “participation premium."

Read the rest of Joe's report for the Membership Puzzle Project here.

What we're reading

Experience experiments: What Whereby.Us’s membership model looks like after adding a Spirited Media site, by Christine Schmidt for Nieman Lab
What media can learn from other member-driven movements, by Emily Goligoski for Membership Puzzle Project
Deep in the heart of Texas, The Tyler Loop, a digital news startup, is working towards sustainability, by Joseph Lichterman for Solution Set
What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work, by Nathan Schneider for Medium

That's it for this week. GroundSourced is about helping you better connect with your community. Have questions you'd like us to answer? Links to stories or studies you're reading that we can pass on to our 1,000+ subscribers? Let me know with an email to simon@groundsource.co.