To design for/with a community means participation, and Open Peer-to-Peer dynamics represent a very strong form of participation, an active one, where the people produces and shares knowledge in order to solve a problem. An Open Peer-to-Peer kind of participation is a recent phenomenon, so it could be very interesting to take a look at how participation has been considered through the years.

And here I’m going to talk about a specific way to analyse and classify participation, regarding it as a ladder.

The first ladder of participation came fron an article written by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 (Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224).

Why use a ladder? Because the most important thing to notice, is that there are different levels of participation, ranging from full participation to fake participation, from being in-control to being under control.

After this one, other ladders of participation have been described: for example the
Ladder of Children’s Participation (also called the Ladder of Youth Participation), from (1997) Roger Hart, Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care, UNICEF:

…that has been adapted as a Ladder of Volunteer Participation too.

(Here and here in Spanish )

…and, guess what, a participation scale has been adapted also for Web 2.0! This image comes from the work of Charlene Li at Forrester (via Steve Rubel). The most striking things is that 52% (the majority) is inactive, but this is not a surprise.