Democracy for Christmas: Voting on Gifts for Baby Jesus

In the UK city of Newcastle, children are using participatory budgeting to celebrate Christmas. To connect with the city's UDecide initiative, the Scotswood Play Centre added audience voting into this year's nativity play. As the play centre's manager described:

“We felt that to include the U-decide concept in the play would introduce children to the way it works and how they can vote for activities that will benefit them and their community. Voting themes in the play included deciding on whether Mary and Joseph should travel to Scotswood on a wonky donkey, a scooter or in a shopping trolley. Also, they decided on what gifts would be given to the baby Jesus.”

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Between Neighborhood Assemblies and Community Reps: PB in Chicago

Participatory budgeting in Chicago's 49th Ward is off to a strong start, with the first phase of neighborhood assemblies now complete. At nine assemblies, hundreds of residents identified over 200 project ideas and selected over 80 people to carry the process forward as community representatives. Spending ideas include community gardens, street paving, murals, bike paths, street lights, wheelchair ramps, and many more infrastructure improvements.

Steering Committee members, from local organizations, facilitated the meetings and played a large role in organizing the assemblies. Between December and March, the community representatives will meet to turn the initial spending ideas into concrete and feasible projects. Then in April, all residents of the ward will be invited to vote for the projects of their choice, to decide which get funded. For more information, see the 49th Ward Participatory Budgeting website, or the media reports below:
- "A Grand Experiment in Budgeting" (Progressive Illinois)
- "Participatory Budgeting Comes to Chicago's 49th Ward" (Prairie State Blue)
- "Participatory Budgeting #2: At the Neighborhood Assembly" (Prairie State Blue)
- "Alderman Joe Moore Asks His Constituents to Spend $1 Million" (Time Out Chicago)
- "Experiment in Democracy: 49th Ward Leads the Way in Participatory Budgeting " (Chicago Talks)

 

 

Participatory Budgeting in Chicago - Neighborhood Assembly Dates

Alderman Joe Moore, of Chicago's 49th ward, has just announced the initial neighborhood assemblies of the ward's participatory budgeting process. There will be 9 assemblies, starting November 3rd and running till December 3rd. The process will then continue till March or April, when residents will decide which projects to fund.

Dear Neighbor,

Around the United States and here in Chicago, city leaders are increasingly asking residents for suggestions about budget spending. Here in the 49th Ward, we're going one step further. Through a novel experiment in democracy, I'm not just asking for your opinion--I'm asking you to make real decisions about how we spend our money.
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Participatory Budgeting in Germany

Rolf Luehrs has just published an update on some of the more than 115 participatory budgeting processes in Germany. As he notes, the experiences differ in three main ways:

Approach
While participatory budgeting was originally designed as an instrument of direct democracy with a binding decision of the citizenry, most of the European PBs are implemented as consultations: The citizens were given opportunity to have their say but it is up to the elected representatives to finally decide about the proposals.

Scope
In many cases only selected parts of the public budget are under consideration in others the entire budget is subject to citizen participation. Interestingly the scope seems to depend on the chosen approach: When the entire budget is under consideration, the opinions and preferences of the citizens usually are not binding.

Instruments & Channels
Some of the participatory budgeting projects are still implemented using only traditional communication channels. In most cases the Internet is leastwise used to spread information. Quiet a lot of municipalities or cities are providing interactive channels on the Internet to support the offline activities. And in a few cases the Internet is the only channel for the citizens to participate.

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FEAST: PB by and for artists

Since February 2009, a group of artists in New York City has been organizing its own variation on participatory budgeting, called FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics). As the website explains:
FEAST is a recurring public dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund new and emerging artmakers. At each FEAST, participants will pay a sliding-scale entrance fee for which they will receive supper and a ballot. Diners will vote on a variety of proposed artist projects. At the end of dinner, the artist whose proposal receives the most votes will be awarded funds collected through the entrance fee to produce the project. The work will then be presented during the next FEAST.

Participants reviewing proposals at the May 2009 FEAST.

Saturday October 3rd is the 5th FEAST event. The previous events have funded 11 diverse arts projects, many of them political or community-oriented. Do FEAST and other similar efforts, such as the UK's "Who Wants to Be?", represent a new form of PB, emerging autonomously from artist communities?

 

 

E-Participatory Budgeting in Australia

From Tiago via techPresident:
The government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the economic downturn and stimulate local economies, has allocated the equivalent of US$30 million to the Community Building Partnership program. Aiming to support local jobs, stimulate growth and improve community facilities, the program allocates between US$260,000 and US$ 350,000 to each of the 93 NSW electoral districts. Under the program, community groups are eligible to electronically submit applications for funding to support local infrastructure and jobs in the district. Once applicants meet the requirements, MPs prioritize which projects are to receive funding.

However, the real novelty comes from the electoral district of Heathcote, where MP Paul McLeay is inviting the district’s citizens to decide through the Internet on the allocation of the funds that the government has made available.
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Comparison of face-to-face and e-PB

Richard Fahey recently wrote a nice comparison of three PB processes that use differing amounts of online engagement, in Toronto, Berlin, and Belo Horizonte. Interestingly, he suggests that a greater percentage of participants had low incomes in the face-to-face processes than in the e-PB process. One of the reasons PB has been so popular is because it tends to at least partly reverse the standard political bias towards the more affluent. Does e-PB take the social justice out of PB, or does the online participation just need to be designed better?

 

 

Progress in Chicago

A quick update on Participatory Budgeting in Chicago's 49th Ward, which continues to move ahead. We've set up a Steering Committee of over 30 community organizations, which has been designing the PB process for the past few months. We're now finishing up the rulebook, which will include guidelines for the neighborhood assemblies, the geographic breakdown of the ward, thematic focuses for spending, selection of projects and community representatives, and roles of key actors.

The plan as it stands now is:
- October/November: neighborhood assemblies to identify spending needs and project ideas, and select community representatives
- November-February: meetings of community representatives, to turn project ideas into full proposals
- March 2010: a single voting day and assembly, to select projects to be funded

We'll post more news here as it develops.

 

 

PB at Toronto Community Housing

For the past month I was in Toronto researching and working on participatory budgeting at Toronto Community Housing. This year was a transition year, which made for an even more interesting and ambitious process. The article below gives a glimpse into how it worked this year, and it includes a short video.

Participatory Budgeting – Working together, making a difference
July 27, 2009, Toronto Community Housing
2009 is the eighth year for Participatory Budgeting at Toronto Community Housing, an idea which originated in Brazil, which gives tenants the power to decide how housing money is spent. They decide how to spend the $9 million in a ...
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Another article on PB in Chicago

Similar to the last article posted, but with pictures:

Tough budget choices? Ask an everyday citizen
http://today.brown.edu/articles/2009/05/baiocchi
By Alison Fairbrother, Today at Brown

An experiment in democracy is brewing in Chicago’s 49th Ward. The neighborhood is vying to become the first community in the United States to use participatory budgeting, in which residents directly decide how to spend public money, to allocate its municipal funds. It is an experiment that imports concepts developed as far away as Brazil. And it takes on added significance as federal, state, and local officials across the country face greater public scrutiny in allocating federal stimulus funds and scarce budget dollars.

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