Participation is useful for its own sake. People feel better about themselves when they have a chance to engage with public process. The kinds of process that stimulate participation the best are non-partisan, inclusive and unstructured. Defining the questions are as much a part of the process as the answers. It is often difficult to extract specific useful outcomes from this kind of process.

The outcome that is most easy to read is a poll or vote. It also provides the least information and is the least inclusive. The questions are not decided by the participants. Convening deliberations that provide greater insight requires careful management to maintain neutrality, stimulate participation and extract meaningful outcomes.

• initiated by participants or an independent non-partisan body
• unstructured; focus is conversations
• little or no intervention by Convenor/s
• one strategy is "Do Nothing" - people are participating already, just go and listen

• usually initiated by an agency (usually government)
• processes with one or more stages such as structured discussions, polls, ratings or submissions
• usually closely managed (or curated)
• outputs from each stage in the process form inputs into subsequent stages or into policy/decision-making

• easier to credibly establish neutrality
• participants are more likely to trust the forum
• easier to stimulate participation
• the authenticity of the contributions is likely to be higher (the process can be skewed by active participants but not by a convener)
• easier to scale because of the low level of intervention that is required
• all participants can have input into deciding the questions to ask, as well as the answers to them

• easier to derive meaningful outcomes that can be used as inputs into decision-making
• possible to enable participants to have input into deciding the questions to ask, as well as the answers to them

• difficult to extract meaningful results that can be easily used as input into decision-making (a great deal of discussion might take place but it takes a great deal of work to comb through it ([Curation]?) to glean credible, specific outputs that can be used in decision-making)

• harder to establish credibility as non-partisan
• harder to stimulate participation
• harder to maintain the authenticity of the outcomes
• harder to scale, especially while maintaining integrity, because of the large amount of intervention that is required

• Public Issues Forums
• Wikipedia provides one example of a vision for participatory democracy where everyone can answer as well as ask questions

• the most extreme example is a poll (the results are easily measured but only the Convenor gets to determine the questions)