On the 1st of June, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) in the UK published online the paper “Empowering communities to influence local decision making: A systematic review of the evidence”.In this paper, Prof. Lawrence Pratchett and his colleagues provide evidence-based lessons on six empowerment mechanisms:1) asset transfer2) citizen governance3) e-participation...
Obviously it is not participatory budgeting, but this rather short list that I have compiled provides an idea of the variety of online initiatives type budget simulators / games. This might be useful to some of those interested in the use of ICTs in Participatory Budgeting experiences. If you know of other similar initiatives please let me know. (originally posted in Facebook's Participatory Budgeting group) FloodSim http://www.floodsim.com/ The Maryland Budget Game http://iat.ubalt....
My colleague Willi shared with me a great presentation about Koln's interesting experiment in participatory budgeting and since I know many of you are interested in this topic I thought I would share it more widely. I hope you enjoy it!
41 U.S. states currently face budget gaps, and judging by the forecasts of even the most optimistic specialists, such a situation is far from being substantially changed in the near future. In this context, it is particularly interesting to highlight the few ICT mediated initiatives that are starting to take place at the subnational (state) level in the United States, aiming – at least supposedly – to get citizens involved in the budgetary process. For instance, in Novemb...
The London government has launched an initiative called “Vote for your Park”, where Londoners can decide where to allocate ten grants of up to £400,000 for London's parks. Voting can be made through the Internet, SMS and postal voting. Since the launch of the initiative there has been criticism about the security of the system and the participatory design of the initiative. I do not know very much about local governments in the UK and I am not at all a specialist in secur...
Following this series of posts about Participatory Budgeting (PB), I would like to describe an experiment in the coordination of which I had the pleasure to participate, which took place in the framework of the e-Agora Project (co-financed by the EC) in the city of Ipatinga, Brazil. Prior to 2001, community leaders of the city of Ipatinga collected written proposals for public works from citizens during neighbourhood meetings which were then submitted for deliberation in PB in loco m...
This post is based on a paper of mine published by the Electronic Democracy Centre (Zurich University) about the experience of the e-Participatory Budgeting of the city of Belo Horizonte. In part 1 of this post I use extracts from a short article by Dan Jellinek (Headstar) and myself that aimed to present a summary of the published paper. At the end, I will add some information contained in the paper about the votes that was not included in the summary article. 1) &nb...
Participatory Budgeting (PB) can be broadly defined as the participation of citizens in the decision-making process of budget allocation and monitoring public spending. Participation may take various forms, from effective decision-making power in the allocation of resources to more modest initiatives that confer voice during the development of the budget. Added to the normative claim that PB gives citizens the opportunity to participate in decisions that directly affect them, it is expecte...