Getting Started with Online Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting exemplifies the IdeaMapr approach of Focus, Explain, Interact. To get useful feedback on your city budget, you need to focus questions on specific aspects. Asking citizens whether $191,930,704 is a good budget for the fire department will only overwhelm them and leave you with little useful input to work with. One good approach is to focus on how various departments propose to use increases in their budget. For example, the fire department might want to add a new fire unit to reduce response times.

The IdeaMapr Budgeting Tool

The second part of the IdeaMapr approach is explaining how these newly funded projects would impact the city. In this example, each “idea” is a proposal to fund a particular project in a department. Each of these proposals includes the purpose of the project and how the project would improve the services offered by the department. For example, increased funding to the library would allow them to offer more digital materials such as e-books, audiobooks, and music. By providing narratives like this for citizens, you give them the context they need to make sense of complex decisions.

The third part of the IdeaMapr approach is to enable citizens to interact with these proposals by “shopping” for items within a given budget. Citizens can choose to fund an expensive project that is very important to them instead of several less expensive options, or choose to cut an expensive project to fund several smaller projects. This question structure allows you to see how much citizens value certain projects over others after they see the relative costs, rather than whether they simply like the idea or not.

Seattle's "People-First" Approach to Citizen Engagement

"Put people first, not just projects and programs, but people”

Samantha Stork, Strategic Advisor to Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods wrote a great update in Governing about Seattle’s progress in Living Cities’ City Accelerator program.

Here is a summary of some of the lessons that Samantha details:

Define the intent of your engagement project

Begin by understanding what the intent of the project is. Define these goals externally, so you can manage expectations from the public. In the IdeaMapr Approach we “Focus” to set clear expectations about which aspects of the project are already decided and which aspects we are inviting feedback on.

Consider the impact on the community

One very important insight that Samantha’s team uncovered was that they were holding too many public meetings and were exhausting their community with too many request to participate. Samantha’s strategy is now to look at “perceived impacted areas and timelines to help them figure out how to reduce meetings or bundle projects”. Her team is also plotting out projects on a map and calendar to help reduce the burden on community members who want to participate.

Seattle’s people-focused approach can be expanded to include which methods of participation people would like to use. Using online tools, like IdeaMapr could reduce the need for people to attend multiple in-person meetings. Also people-focused can be about helping to create understanding by reducing the complexity of the engagement process.

Read the original article here