Community participation in research has been around for centuries but global connectivity, smartphones and the internet have revolutionised approaches, types of engagement and data quality of participatory research or citizen science. Our own EchidnaCSI citizen science project is a good example of the potential of community participation for enabling research through data and material collection. However, many projects experience low participation or lack of participant diversity. We recently established SciStarter Australia in collaboration with the world leading citizen science engagement platform SciStarter.org. with the aim to increase community engagement but also to develop approaches to diversify participation and measure impact of projects.