Institutionalising participation: The implementation of a civic web platform

Participation is key to understand our contemporary societies. Despite its prevalence, it remains insufficiently theorised in certain context. One such context is crowdsourcing, which has been proposed as a way to resolve so called ‘wicked’ problems. Crowdsourcing has tended to hold implicit rational and universal epistemologies: the more participation the better. Using resourcing theory, we look at a civic platform implemented with the ambitions to change social relations within the city of Madrid. We propose a processual view of participation which evolves in time taking and being given different qualities as schemas are enacted and resources created. The platform we analyse was supposed to engage citizens to become participative members of society in the definition of public policies. When this does not occur, alternative resources are designed to palliate the deficiencies of the platform. We contribute to the literature on participation and urban policies by arguing that participation, however it is designed, will necessarily favour some at the expense of others, challenging its often implicit universalist and rationalist assumptions