The ramifications of new technologies are rarely understood until they become entrenched, channeling societal development down unhealthy paths and resulting in lost opportunities. Participatory technology assessment (pTA) enables everyday citizens, otherwise minimally represented in the politics of science and technology, to develop and express informed judgments. Their views complement those of experts and deepen the social and ethical analysis of technology.

The time is ripe to institutionalize a robust national technological assessment program incorporating both expert and participatory methods. Through the Internet, it is now possible to organize such an endeavor on a distributed, agile and open basis. A group of institutions has begun planning such a system: the Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology (ECAST) network. ECAST will be independent of the government, not-for-profit, and comprise a complementary set of nonpartisan policy research institutions, universities and science museums spread across the United States.

Richard Sclove is the founder of the Loka Institute, a non-profit dedicated to making science and technology responsive to democratically decided priorities, and co-founder of ECAST. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.