ABSTRACT
The architecture of participation is one of the more subtle founding principles of Web 2.0. It builds on the idea of user-generated content and feeds directly into the enormous scale of data that Web 2.0 services are collecting. e key to understanding it is to give equal weight to both words: this is about technical architecture as much as participation, and at the most basic level this means that a service can be designed to facilitate mass user participation and improve its own performance as a consequence. As Allan Vermeulen, Chief Technology Ocer at Amazon, told the founding Web 2.0 conference: the architecture of participation concept is based on the premise that a lot of information is “locked up” inside their customers and that they could build technology which channels that information into the system so that it can be used by others (O’Reilly et al. 2004).
