A space to discuss democratic participation, share lived experiences, and contribute to research.

The Forum connects public conversation with research. It gives people a space to exchange perspectives and enables the INTERFACED project to learn from their experiences.

Its main objectives are to:

  • Engage citizens and stakeholders in conversations about democratic participation.
  • Share the project’s work openly, including stories, interviews, event reports, and fellowship outputs.
  • Gather participatory research data through people’s contributions and discussions.
  • Analyse conversations to identify patterns, insights, and connections, and turn them into research findings and visualisations.
  • Connect lived experience with research, bringing people’s perspectives into a broader understanding of democratic participation.

How to contribute to the research

Taking part is simple:

  1. Create an account on the Forum. Registration is quick and straightforward.
  2. Give your consent for your contributions to be used in research.
  3. Join the conversation. Read the stories, respond to a prompt, share your experience, or comment on someone else’s contribution.

You can start small. Even a short answer or comment can help build a richer picture of how people experience and practise democratic participation.

Interviews follow a separate consent process: each interviewee agrees specifically to participate in an interview for the research. All data used in the research is anonymised.

How the Forum works

The INTERFACED Forum is a dedicated space on the Edgeryders platform, created for the INTERFACED project. It serves two connected purposes: engaging people with an interest in democratic participation and collecting data for research.

The Forum follows Edgeryders’ research methodology, which combines ethnographic research with semantic social network analysis. This approach helps researchers explore people’s experiences, understand how ideas and themes relate to one another, and identify patterns across conversations.

How your contributions inform research

Contributions to the Forum are coded and incorporated into the project’s research corpus. Researchers analyse this material to develop findings and visualisations that show how people understand, experience, and practise democratic participation.

The Forum also makes it possible to explore connections between contributions and participants’ perspectives. For example, interviews are published as conversations between two distinct participants, with each contribution linked to its anonymised author. This preserves the structure of the exchange and supports the analysis of relationships and patterns across the research material.

What can you do on the Forum?

  • Explore the research: Read journalists’ stories, fellowship work, event reports, and interviews.
  • Share your perspective: Start a discussion or comment on topics related to participation, governance, and civic life.
  • Answer a prompt: Respond to a short question about your experiences or views. Prompts are also used at events to make it easy for participants to contribute.
  • Build on others’ ideas: Reply to posts and answers, exchange perspectives, and help conversations develop. The project team follows up on new topics to encourage further discussion.

Join the conversation

The INTERFACED Forum is open to citizens, researchers, journalists, civil society organisations, and anyone interested in democratic participation.

Your experiences and perspectives can help deepen our understanding of how participation happens in practice.

Visit the INTERFACED Forum