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IAP2 USA advances public participation in the United States by providing its affiliate members with tools and information to conduct high-quality public participation processes, by providing government, industry, nonprofit organizations and participants with educational resources to increase the quality and value of their participation in such processes, and by advocating for quality public participation programs based on our Core Values and Code of Ethics.

The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) Code of Ethics for Public Participation Practitioners supports and reflects IAP2's Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation. The Core Values define the expectations and aspirations of the public participation process. The Code of Ethics speaks to the actions of practitioners.

Technology of Participation is an integrated set of facilitation methods, tools and approaches that foster authentic participation and meaningful collaboration. From rural villages to global corporations, people want to participate in making choices that affect their lives. We want our efforts to make a difference in the world. Changing expectations are morphing the hierarchical triangle into a circle. Leaders of the future will foster authentic participation.

What is Pathways through Participation? Pathways through Participation is a two-and-a-half year (April 2009 - Nov 2011) qualitative research project that aimed to improve our understanding of how and why people participate, how their involvement changes over time, and what pathways, if any, exist between different activities.

This article is about power structures in society and how they interact. Specifically it is a guide to seeing who has power when important decisions are being made. It is quite old, but never-the-less of great value to anyone interested in issues of citizen participation. The concepts discussed in this article about 1960's America apply to any hierarchical society but are still mostly unknown, unacknowledged or ignored by many people around the world. Most distressing is that even people who have the job of representing citizens views seem largely unaware, or even dismissive of these principles. Many planners, architects, politicians, bosses, project leaders and power-holder still dress all variety of manipulations up as 'participation in the process', 'citizen consultation' and other shades of technobable.

ParticipateDB is a collaborative catalogue for online tools for participation (often referred to as tools for web-based engagement, online participation, e-participation, e-consultation, online dialogue, online deliberation etc.).

Involve are experts in public engagement, participation and dialogue. We carry out research and deliver training to inspire citizens, communities and institutions to run and take part in high-quality public participation processes, consultations and community engagement. We believe passionately in a democracy where citizens are empowered to take and influence the decisions that affect their lives.

IAP2 has a wealth of resources available assist organizations, decision makers, policy makers and practitioners to improve the quality of the public participation work.  The following resources are protected by copyright by the International Association for Public Participation and may be used for information purposes.

The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is focused on developing policies and programs to accelerate economic recovery and create stronger communities. We do this by harnessing human capital and facilitating financial capital.

International Journal for Public Participation (2007 - 2010) merged with the Journal for Public Deliberation as a joint venture between DDC and IAP2 in November 2010.  In announcing the joint venture in November 2010, IAP2 President Desley Renton said "this initiative builds on the foundations of both journals and will extend the discourse in the field with readers benefiting from firsthand experience of public participation practitioners".

If you are like us, you want to participate, yet attending a public meeting that requires physical presence is both time consuming and inconvenient. Plus, you want to contribute ideas of your own, not just listen to someone else tell you what's best. Adding MindMixer to your community-planning project will only enhance your experience, broaden the reach of participants in your community and allow you and others true freedom to infuse your own creative ideas into the process.

Involve are public participation specialists; bringing institutions, communities and citizens together to accelerate innovation, understanding discussion and change. Involve makes a practical difference by delivering the highest quality public participation processes possible as well as undertaking rigorous research and policy analysis into what works.

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

PACE's mission is to inspire interest, understanding, and investment in civic engagement. PACE'S goals are... to build a community within philanthropy committed to vigorous debate and action around encouraging participation and engagement in community, civic, and political life; to inspire and incubate strategic collaborations with policy makers, nonprofits, business, and the media to support active citizenship; and to increase the quantity and the quality of philanthropic investment in civic engagement strategies.

CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on civic education in schools, colleges, and community settings and on young Americans' voting and political participation, service, activism, media use, and other forms of civic engagement. It is based at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

Heartland Democracy engages directly with Midwestern youth, independent thinkers, centrists, and folks who are uninvolved in their community and politics.  Using shared values and critical issues as the bases and sparks for discussion, Heartland Democracy targets specific participants, institutions, demographic segments, and geographic areas for exchanges in which we weave together a coherent set of values, stories, history, facts, and ideas to reach the emotional factors so decisive in the shaping of mindsets. 

A national leader in the field of civic participation and community change, Everyday Democracy helps people of different backgrounds and views talk and work together to solve problems and create communities that work for everyone.

Participedia harnesses the power of collaboration to respond to a recent global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world. We live in a world in which citizens of most countries are asking for greater involvement in collective decisions. Many governments, non-governmental organizations, and even some corporations are responding by experimenting with ways to increase public participation. Hundreds of thousands of participatory processes occur each year in almost every country in the world. They are adressing a wide variety of political and policy problems. And they often supplement and sometimes compete with more traditional forms of politics, such as representative democracy. Participedia responds to these developments by providing a low-cost, easy way for hundreds of researchers and practitioners from across the globe to catalogue and compare the performance of participatory political processes.

Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities-San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich-and draw meaningful insights. Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app.