Ladder of Participation

The Ladder of Participation = a typology that can be applied to the interplay of institutions (and corporations), with peer-based communities

Author: Sherry Arnstein

URL = http://www.comminit.com/planningmodels/pmodels/planningmodels-129.html

Graph at http://www.comminit.com/images3/partladder2.gif

General Context to the Ladder

Description

Context: " Sociologist Roger Hart wrote a book called Children's Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care for UNICEF in 1997. This groundbreaking work put the work of young people and adult allies around the world in the context of a global movement for participation, offering needed guidance and criticism of many efforts. The "Ladder of Children's Participation," also called the "Ladder of Youth Participation," is one of many significant tools from the book." (http://www.freechild.org/ladder.htm)

The different levels are described here:

""The bottom rungs of the ladder are (1) Manipulation and (2) Therapy. These two rungs describe levels of "non-participation" that have been contrived by some to substitute for genuine participation. Their real objective is not to enable people to participate in planning or conducting programs, but to enable powerholders to 'educate' or 'cure' the participants. Rungs 3 and 4 progress to levels of 'tokenism' that allow the have-nots to hear and to have a voice: (3) Informing and (4) Consultation. When they are proffered by powerholders as the total extent of participation, citizens may indeed hear and be heard. But under these conditions they lack the power to insure that their views will be heeded by the powerful. When participation is restricted to these levels, there is no follow-through, no 'muscle,' hence no assurance of changing the status quo. Rung (5) Placation is simply a higher level tokenism because the ground rules allow have-nots to advise, but retain for the powerholders the continued right to decide.

Further up the ladder are levels of citizen power with increasing degrees of decision-making clout. Citizens can enter into a (6) Partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power holders. At the topmost rungs, (7) Delegated Power and (8) Citizen Control, have-not citizens obtain the majority of decision-making seats, or full managerial power." (http://www.comminit.com/planningmodels/pmodels/planningmodels-129.html)

Characteristics

Adapted to the community vs. institution situation.

8) Community-initiated and directed

7) Community-initiated, shared decisions with institution

6) Institution-initiated, shared decisions with community

5) Consulted and informed

4) Assigned but informed

3) Tokenism

2) Decoration

1) Manipulation

The Ladder of Participation in the Peer Economy

Proposed by Michel Bauwens:

1. Consumers : you make, they consume. The classic model.

2. Self-service: you make, they go get it themselves. This is where consumers start becoming prosumers, but the parameters of the cooperation are totally set by the producing corporation. It's really not much more than a strategy of externalization of costs. Think of ATM's and gas stations. We could call it simple externalization.

3. Do-it-yourself: you design, they make it themselves. One step further, pioneered by the likes of Ikea, where the consumers, re-assembles the product himself. Complex externalization of business processes.

4. Company-based Crowdsourcing: The company organizes a value chain which lets the wider public produce the value, but under the control of the company .

5. Co-design : you set the parameters, but you design it together . The Lego Factory, which allows for the self-design of new lego packages, is the paradigmatic example.

6. Co-creation : you both create cooperatively. In this stage, the corporation does not even set the parameters, the prosumer is an equal partner in the development of new products. Perhaps the industrial model of the adventure sports material makers would fit here. This trend has been described most prominently by Eric von Hippel in the Democratization of Innovation.

7. Communities of minipreneurs create exchange value, using proprietary platforms as a context for doing business in a distributed fashion. Minipreneurs are freelance designers operating on their own or through networked micro agencies and have a full ecology of enabling webites at their disposal.

8. Sharing communities create the use value, Web 2.0 proprietary platforms, attempt to monetize participation.

9. Peer production proper: communities create the value, using Commons, with assistance from corporations who attempt to create derivative streams of value. Linux is the paradigmatic example.

10. Peer production with cooperative production: peer producers create their own vehicles for monetization .

11. Peer production communities or sharing communities place themselves explicitely outside of the monetary economy, and eventually attempt alternatives to monetization. Wikipedia is an example of a collective production endeavour which has explicitely refused income from advertising.

One of the domains of non-monetary valuation has been called the Adventure Economy by the organizers of the Couchsurfing hospitality exchange network:

"We coin the term adventure economy to refer to a gift economy that is pay-forward, in-person, global and among strangers. In any economy, there are challenges in allocating resources effectively and avoiding abuse, but these are of special concern in non-market economies among strangers, where we don't have the information mechanisms of the price system nor of social relations, and we are also missing the risk-reduction mechanisms of contracts ."