Participatory Budgeting Practices, Places, Games and Resources

Recently I’ve seen a swirl of information (mostly on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv) about participatory budgeting. Below, you’ll find a sampling of this info, in relatively raw form. I do not know enough to sort it all out, but it looks really fascinating.

Most of this material is about online public budgeting exercises, but some of it also describes the kind of face-to-face, seriously empowered mass-participatory civic budgeting processes developed in Brazil which have spread widely in the last decade or so.

I had no idea there was so much activity in this arena. Given

(a) the attention currently focused on the budget crisis,

(b) the dire impact of that crisis at all levels of government in so many places,

(c) the extreme consequences that could arise from this or that approach to addressing the crisis, and

(d) the major social, economic, political and environmental issues that underly ANY approach to deal with budget shortfalls — and which thus surface in the debates about which approach to pursue,

I think it is high time that We the People become directly involved in those decisions — and for politicians and bureaucrats to realize this may be the only way to avoid getting fried by the heat of this controversial fire. The following resources provide a glimpse of the many experiments underway to enable such public involvement, to help well-intentioned politicians avoid public and partisan attack, and to bring more vitality and co-intelligence to our currently back-sliding democracy.

Were any country to seriously pursue and expand the extent, co-intelligence and power of participatory budgeting, the impact would be profound — not only on the functioning of society, but on the transformation of our dominant cultural narratives about what democracy is and what it is capable of.

Blessings on the Journey.

Coheartedly,
Tom

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Online citizen participatory government budget tools

A BROAD COMPILATION

http://www.theconnectedrepublic.org/posts/345

FEDERAL

http://budgethero.publicradio.org/widget/widget.php?refid=apm
http://www.federalbudgetchallenge.org/budget_challenge/sim/budget_master.html

STATE

North Carolina
http://www.governor.state.nc.us/budgetapp/

California
* Next Ten:
http://www.nextten.org/budgettool/site/thesim/flashcheck.html

* California Budget Balancer (LA Times):
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/budget/

* Erase California’s budget deficit (Sacramento Bee):
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/02/04/3377894/erase-californias-budget-deficit.html

LOCAL

Wilmington, N.C.
http://www.cityofwilmingtonbudgetchallenge.com/

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Susanna Haas Lyons’ suggestions

some online budget allocators include:
http://www.budgetsimulator.com/info/
http://www.priorityspend.org/
http://corporate.bangthetable.com/

and some examples of projects in play include
http://www.federalbudgetchallenge.org/budget_challenge/sim/budget_master.html
http://iat.ubalt.edu/MDBudgetGame/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html
http://www.gothamgazette.com/budgetgame/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl-2,0,6957202.htmlstory
http://budgethero.publicradio.org/widget/widget.php
http://northsydney.budgetallocator.com/
http://toughchoices.co.uk/

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From Tim Bonnemann

ParticipateDB along with some project examples that fall into the same general category:

* Budget Allocator 
http://participatedb.com/tools/125
* Budget Simulator
http://participatedb.com/tools/100
* Next 10
http://participatedb.com/tools/103 
* Maryland Budget Map Game 
http://participatedb.com/tools/115 
* Demos-Budget 
http://participatedb.com/tools/140 

Tim Bonnemann’s thoughts on two recent examples (LA Budget Challenge, New York Times Budget Puzzle) here:

• http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/01/07/los-angeles-budget-challenge-when-… 
• http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/02/09/los-angeles-budget-challenge-feedb… 
• http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/11/14/new-york-times-budget-puzzle/ 
• http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/11/15/budget-puzzle-participant-feedback… 
• http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2010/11/16/does-the-budget-puzzle-qualify-as-… 

Tim says “I’d be very interested in sharing notes about how any of these tools could or should be improved and what a good overall process would look like, ideally. The current “state of the art” is still lacking in many ways. I have lots of questions around usability, bias, transparency, embedded learning, opportunities for deliberation, impact on decision making etc.”

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From: Tiago Peixoto

Learning from the South: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide – an
Invitation to Global Cooperation

By Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzberg, Giovanni Allegretti – with the
collaboration of Anja Röcke

This report represents the attempt to provide a first over- view of
participatory budgets in the world. Our aim was to present and analyse
existing cases using a coherent definiion and typology. This report,
however, is not the result of a separate research project, but is
designed to facilitate future research on the topic.

You can download the full report here

Thanks to Giovanni Allegretti for sharing this, and congratulations to
him, Yves, Carsten and Anja!

E-participatory budgeting:
innovative practice in Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
One of th
e most interesting e-participation experiments
is the e-participatory budget of Belo Horizonte, in Brazil.
With 2.35 million inhabitants, this city is the sixth largest
in Brazil and an important political centre in the country.
Its PB is one of the oldest in Brazil: it began in 1993 and
its methodology has been innovative. Most notably, it has
included an autonomous housing PB designed to deal with
this especially important issue. It is based on a two-year cycle,
a feature that has tended to inspire other experiments in
Brazil, and places emphasis on popular control over the real
execution of the public works that have been chosen.
In 2006 a digital PB was added as a third pillar, which was
repeated in 2008 and 2010. The digital PB has three objectives:
to modernise PB through the use of ICTs; to increase
citizen involvement in the process, and to include big investments,
concerning the whole city, in the participatory
budgeting process. In fact, most Brazilian PBs face a double
problem: participation remains relatively limited (1 to 3
percent of the people in cities, somewhat higher in smaller
towns) and the biggest investments tend to remain outside
their reach.
The idea is to organise an online vote open to all residents
older than 16, in order to prioritise some investments that
require much more than the amounts available at the district
level. In order to participate, citizens have to access the
e-voting platform through the city‘s official website, where
information on the various public works is provided. The
decision is made through majority rule, with no preference
given to socially disadvantaged areas. In 2006, 25 million
R$ (around 14 million US$) were made available to the digital
PB. The amount was increased to 50 million (28 million
US$) in 2008, so that one public work (a beltway around
a very important square) could be selected. In comparison,
around 80 million R$ (44 million US$) were given to the
district PB in 2007-2008, and 110 million R$ (around 61
million US$) in 2009-2010. (In this last round, 110 public
works were selected, which means that the average amount
was 1 million R$, around 550,000 US$.) The methodology
was somewhat different in 2006, when voters could cast
9 votes, one per district, and 2009, when voters had only
one choice and it was also possible to vote by phone.
173,000 persons voted in 2006 (nearly 10 percent of the
Belo Horizonte electorate), and 124,000 in 2008 – compared
with 38,000, 34,000 and 44,000 voters for the district
PB in 2005/2006, 2007/2008 and 2009/2010. The increase
in participation with online voting has been a clear success.
However, the deliberative dimension has been virtually lost
(only 1,200 contributions were made in the online forum in
2006), and the digital participatory budget looks more like
a ‚light‘ referendum than a ‚traditional‘ PB. This peculiar
success has made the Belo Horizonte digital PB an internationally
recognised good practice (Peixoto, 2008).

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VIDEOS OF PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

– La Plata (Argentina): Participatory Budgeting uses SMS-voting and electronic ballots.

– Belo Horizonte (Brazil) Co-Governance: part of Belo Horizonte’s participatory budgeting includes Internet and interactive voice response (IVR) voting.

– Recife (Brazil) Participatory Budgeting: includes electronic ballots and Internet voting.