Augmented participation: the use of media communication tools and practices to facilitate, accelerate, intensify, and follow up in participatory design processes, from curricula to neighborhoods to bodies politic.

As successive technological revolutions have been touted in the service of prior concepts of society, culture, planning, and process (print, film, television, the internet, computer games), new practices have indeed emerged, in the service of a very broad spectrum of understandings of "participation", from crowdsourcing to new forms of community involvement in urban planning and design. In "developed" countries, the recognized technical impediments to direct democracy in government, architecture, media, and education have been removed... and yet, we still find that we have work to do.