Participation is a difficult concept where it concerns the Geoweb. All Web 2.0 is considered to be participatory, by design, whether it's a Twittervision post, a mashup, or the development of code to change society. Public participation GIS, by contrast, defines participation as being involved in specific public policies.
Here's an excellent typology of participation on Web 2.0 from Business Week magazine.
If we use this as one axis of participation and use, as the other axis, Sherry Arnstein's classic Ladder of Citizen Participation in Governance then I think we'd have something workable. It still leaves some gaps, for example, what happens when a single person simultaneously occupies multiple categories? And it still fails to capture motivation to participation or some factor that could be called "stake in physical locality".
Here's a definitions of participation I found from article on video conferencing I reviewed for a conference.
Participation, or the active contribution by participants, can be facilitated in many ways. Participation includes verbal communication and gestures that signal recognition, rapport or a connection with others, understanding, and openness to new ideas or information. Participation in group videoconferencing also includes the potential engagement of participants who interact with others before during and after the videoconferencing to engage in learning, empowerment, the formation of identity or self definition, as well as individual or group action leading to individual, group, organization or community change.
Here's a beautifully detailed contribution from our partner at CEC, Cody Rice,
What is participation?
Comments/reactions, volunteered information, voting/rating, agenda-setting, learning, data collection
Who are participants?
Internet access, general public, interested public, stakeholders, NGOs, government (all levels), academia
What is expected of participants?
Time, mental effort, homework, communication of values
Why are they participating?
What is the payoff for the participants?
How do they participate?
Creating content: writing, video, maps; editing content; commenting; voting; submission of data; photos; citizen science; responding/reacting to moderated content; sharing/pushing contentInformation, consultation, participation
Is it just online?
How are they recruited?
Promotional mechanisms
Where do people gather?
Existing communities of interest (off the internet)
Existing (on the internet): Flickr, Youtube, Blogs, media websites, etc.
What is the motivation of the sponsor?
How does the sponsor benefit from participation?Is anyone listening?Are there feedback mechanism?Just to collect information? To “make the invisible, visible”? To change attitudes, opinions, perspective?
Is anyone learning?
Informed vs. uninformed participation, opportunities for collaborative learning
What are the various participatory technologies?
Listserv, SMS
Wiki
Blogging
Mapping
Voting/ Rating
Meet Up
Tagging
Footprint, carbon calculators
Google Maps, Google Earth
Social Media: Facebook, My Space, Linked In, etc.
Data standards: xml, kml, Geo RSS, APIs
Wikimapia: Let’s describe the whole Earth
GEOWiki databases: GEOWIKI is essentially a means of many people contributing to the development of a large database (sometimes called crowd-sourcing). On this page are a number of databases that are being developed using a Google Earth based GEOWIKI and which, after quality control, will be used to answer some important environmental questions and will also be made available for download in common GIS formats.
CONSERVATION_EYE is a land use change alert system based on the MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields tree cover product (Collection 4, release 3). CONSERVATION-EYE is designed to allow rapid regional and local visualisation of areas of forest cover loss and gain over recent years. The data are at 500m resolution and so do not pick up small scale change. See Terrascope (Terrascope) for detailed visual change analysis in Google Earth. The rationale for CONSERVATION-EYE is to provide an easy mechanism for hotspotting land use change in and around protected areas for non remote-sensing specialists.
In Dot Earth, reporter Andrew C. Revkin examines efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits. Supported in part by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Mr. Revkin tracks relevant news from suburbia to Siberia, and conducts an interactive exploration of trends and ideas with readers and experts.http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact.
Journey North: Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of spring through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events.
Geo Commons: The Geo Commons beta validated the great demand for Intelligent Mapping Solutions that enable people at all skill levels to find, create and share geographic knowledge for learning, decision making and problem solving. Our focus on data sharing and visualization coupled with an easy-to-use Web interface created tremendous interest. All told, the Geo Commons community created over 4,500 datasets, 70,000 layers and over 10,000 maps.
Many Eyes: Many Eyes bets on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.
My Starbucks Idea: You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen.
Vulcan Project: The Vulcan Project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past. The Vulcan project has achieved the quantification of the United States fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the scale of individual factories, powerplants, roadways and neighborhoods.
Danaus plexippus Flickr group: Please share your photo of the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) or their habitat. If you have an interesting story about the photo, be sure to include it in the description. If you share the location, we will include your photo and caption in an interactive map layer we are developing.
Oil Shale and Tar Sands PEIS Maps: Several of the following maps, including oil shale and tar sands resource areas and alternatives boundaries maps from the Draft PEIS, are also available in KML format, for interactive viewing with Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer "virtual globe" software.