Participatory Action Research Assistant

AI Tools for Community Research: Built by Youth, Guided by Values

As part of our Summer 2025 arts internship and mentorship program, we’re exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support ethical, community-driven work. This tool is one of the outcomes—a prototype designed to help users think through and design their own Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects.

This tool is designed to help communities and researchers think through the process of Participatory Action Research (PAR)—a collaborative approach grounded in equity, shared knowledge, and real-world impact.

This isn’t a finished product or a complete solution—and that’s part of the point. It’s a first experiment, built by emerging artists and researchers learning to design with purpose. Creating this tool has been a challenging and genuinely fun process, and we’re continuing to test, refine, and expand it over the summer. As we learn more, so will the tool. We hope you enjoy trying it out and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Try the Participatory Action Research Assistant

What this tool is about

Rather than offering fixed answers, the chatbot encourages critical reflection, shared decision-making, and practical planning. It’s here to prompt useful questions and support thoughtful design at every stage, from identifying an issue to taking collective action.

PAR is rooted in cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting—always in close partnership with those directly affected. This tool offers guidance on forming inclusive teams, selecting participatory methods, analyzing data together, and ensuring the research leads to meaningful change.

At every step, the focus remains on co-ownership, ethical integrity, and building relationships that centre community leadership.

Special Thanks

This project was made possible through early support from the OpenAI Researcher Access Program and the Creative Entrepreneurship program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. This is also the beginning of our third year of programming, which was piloted and seeded over the last couple years with funding and support from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse and Manitoba Arts Council. The idea to build this simple PAR assistant also comes from what we’ve learned from the amazing and inspiring researchers and artists with the University of Victoria Community Based Research Lab. We’re thankful to everyone for introducing us to these concepts and approaches!

We extend our heartfelt thanks to Tony Eetak, Eva Suluk, Krish Agrawal, Jamie Bell, and Dr. Olaf Kuhlke—each of whom played a key role in shaping, inspiring, and encouraging this work. Your insights, creativity, and commitment continue to guide this journey.

About the Author

Digital Salvage

Editor

The Digital Salvage Art Collective is a Winnipeg, Manitoba-based experiment in memory, machine, and the North—where AI drifts through abandoned archives and forgotten code, reassembling echoes into something new. It’s art as algorithm, history as signal, a collaboration between human instinct and artificial perception. Here, youth and artists don’t just recover the past—they rewire it, remix it, let it glitch and evolve, forging a living archive that pulses with both human and machine imagination.

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