This year’s edition of the FutureEverything festival in Manchester brought a well-known and much discussed phenomenon to the fore: participatory culture. From Wikileaks to Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution, to the Arab Spring, participatory technologies have demonstrated their powerful political potential. The world of culture is harnessing the same connected energies with projects that involve citizen scientists cataloging celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy, crowd-curated photo exhibitions and of course the many projects created by artists and designers who either directly use collective action or bring it under a new light