Welcome to the PMCA Guidebook, a project initiated by students in a course on Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley taught by the illustrious Howard Rheingold and Xiao Qiang. As a resource for participatory media, we intend for the guidebook to itself be participatory – i.e. we encourage your participation and the continued co-evolution of this resource beyond the scope of our course. We even illustrate the use of participatory media for collective action by incorporating them into this guidebook, for example by using RSS in our News Feeds and using the Social Networking Tool of Facebook to create a group dedicated to Participatory Media and Collective Action.

The PMCA Guidebook is intended for individuals, organizations, scholars, and other interested parties seeking to use participatory media for collective action, or PMCA. Towards this end, it classifies participatory media into different categories (listed in the 'Technologies' section to the left), offers examples in each category, and characterizes each category according to criteria (listed in the 'Criteria' section to the left) relevant for collective action. For example, the category of Social Networking Tools includes the examples of Facebook and MySpace, and is characterized according to the criteria of cost and write-accessibility. This framework is intended to help parties interested in PMCA compare different participatory media according to the same criteria, and choose the ones most appropriate to their needs and preferences. E.g. if members of a student group were interested in mobilizing collective action on the Burmese monks’ protests, this guidebook would allow them to compare different participatory media on choose among them. Note that the participatory media are not mutually exclusive, but can be leveraged together in an articulated PMCA strategy.

This guidebook is also intended to operate in the reverse direction: as it is fleshed out, parties interested in a particular participatory medium can learn more about its characteristics in comparison to other participatory media. In other words, this guidebook is both a resource for moving from criteria to participatory media and developing PMCA strategy, and for moving from participatory media to criteria and developing empirical knowledge of PMCA.

As an aspiring empirical resource, the PMCA Guidebook hopes to answer questions such as: How do different participatory media compare to each other vis-à-vis collective action? Under which circumstances or for which purposes are different participatory media useful for collective action? And, according to which criteria to characterize different participatory media vis-à-vis collective action? On this last question, we recognize that the criteria in this guidebook are debatable – they are a limited set, and leave out characteristics that are difficult to quantify. For example, how to incorporate ethical concerns? E.g. if Facebook retains copyright over all content uploaded by users, should this be factored into how Facebook or Social Networking Tools in general are conceived as PMCA? Users of this guidebook are encouraged to challenge and potentially change these criteria. Ultimately, we hope to further the participatory dialogue regarding PMCA. Onwards!