My 2004 research used institutional ethnography (e.g. Smith, D. E. (1987) The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON) to critically explore the public participation of anti-poverty activists in Ottawa, Canada. As members of the City’s Poverty Issues Advisory Committee (PIAC), activists expertly subverted institutional barriers to undertake anti-poverty work. However, amid government discourses of ‘improving’ and ‘streamlining’, their participation was simultaneously arranged and contained. This inquiry explored how, even through claims of citizen participation, political and economic arrangements can regulate activism. Nonetheless, imagining this regulation as monolithic obscures human agency and does little to inform change; instead, a grounded exploration of PIAC members’ specific participation practices reflects how the ‘tyranny’ of participation occurs through incremental, commonsense – and contested – everyday practices.