Today we are seeing rapid growth in variety and quality in the world of user-generated media content. In some remarkable cases, the creators have developed their own technology and created unique systems. In such cases, this content is also of potentially high value as technology research in its own right. But so far the research community does not have a method to exploit this potential resource. Therefore, we have proposed a new kind of academic society, which we call “NicoNicoGakkai Beta,” to promote user participatory research with non-professional users. In this paper, we describe the background, the concept and the overview of the academic society. We present a “pattern language” documenting the ideas that guides its design, and we report on the outcome of this approach to date.