The Participation Company
Over at Human Transit, public transportation planner Jarrett Walker points to yet another online budget puzzle, this one from Portland, OR and still ongoing: portland: balance the budget yourself Portland’s Tri-Met faces another horrible funding shortfall this year, but they’ve come up with a good survey tool to engage the public in their decisions about what services [...]
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Josh Lerner (Co-Director, The Participatory Budgeting Project) shared this conference announcement via the NCDD listserv: International Conference: Participatory Budgeting in the US and Canada March 2012 New York City, NY From the email: In a time of widespread budget crises and plummeting trust in government, politicians and community members are searching for more democratic and accountable [...]
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If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to check out this exciting event the IAP2 NorCal Chapter is putting on (I’m chapter co-chair): IAP2 NorCal Event: Fixing Broke(n) Governments through Serious Games, November 17 in San Francisco Governments around the world are all facing budget shortfalls, spending cuts and reduced services. All [...]
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On Friday, the City of Calgary launched a large-scale citizen engagement project: Our City. Our Budget. Our Future. In February 2011, Council approved the engagement process for the facilitated review of core services and The City’s business planning and budget process. It is an extensive engagement process that will facilitate conversations with citizens, employees and [...]
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Over on Facebook, the Kettering Foundation asks with regard to the Times’ Budget Puzzle: What do you think: are budgeting exercises like these what we would call “deliberative choice work”? If not, how are they related? For a definition of what Kettering means by choice work, we turn to the ever-competent NCDD resource center and [...]
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The New York Times’ Budget Puzzle has been getting quite a bit of buzz over the past 48 hours. Here’s what I wrote in an email to the NCDD mailing list yesterday: What I find particularly interesting about this implementation is that it comes with a very large number of viable combinations that would all result [...]
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Update 11/14: For more background, see this accompanying NYTimes story: O.K., You Fix the Budget Yesterday, The New York Times launched Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget, an easy-to-use online budget simulator that challenges participants to balance the US federal budget both short and longer-term. From the website: Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s [...]
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The other day, someone on Twitter passed along this announcement about a new budget consultation in Seattle, WA: I admit it doesn’t take a lot more to get me interested, so I clicked right through. Here’s a bit of a checklist I usually apply when I scan online consultations such as this one (listed in no particular [...]
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A number of people commented on last month’s post about the Los Angeles Budget Challenge (both online and offline), and most seemed to share my concerns regarding the survey design. Shortly after publishing the post, I reached out to the City of Los Angeles via the email address given on the site. I figured many readers might [...]
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Via Twitter today, I came across a new online consultation by the City of Los Angeles: Los Angeles Budget Challenge How will you balance the City’s budget? The Mayor of the City of Los Angeles is given the responsibility by the City Charter to evelop a budget plan that must be presented for City Council [...]
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I usually refrain from embedding other people’s hard work unless I have at least some additional value to add. In this case, however, I’m simply glad to see my German hometown embrace public participation: Participatory Budgeting Cologne View more documents from Matthias Trénel. About Zebralog: Zebralog is a not-for-profit organization that supports modern democratic decision making [...]
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