Involve’s Citizen Lab (CL) will take place once a year. Each time, we invite experts and street experts to enrich Involve’s research, methodologies, practice and impact.
In this blog, we summarize the Paris Citizen Lab. In Paris, Involve invited (street) experts to talk about their experiences with participation in social and public services.
Key messages:
– participation provides broad democratic support for local society and broad support for society per se.
– participation should be applied to all public, semi-public and social services.
– participation starts best from the bottom up
– participation should not be hindered by top-down regulations; these regulations should be subject to participation scrutiny
– resources for participation can be both public and private (from the users)
– participation must be guided but remains in the hands of the user