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Open Meeting: Software for Participatory Budgeting

February 29, 2012 in Updates, Working Group

There are already shining examples of direct forms of democracy and deliberation going on around the world but many of them are small scale, local and idiosyncratic solutions. Can technology help to take these discussions to the next level and offer templates for solutions that could be applied all over the world?

When: Today, 5pm GMT
How to join: Add your name and Skype ID to the etherpad

We’re also conducting a Software for Participatory Budgeting Census – if you know of examples which should be in there please add them to this spreadsheet!

CC-BY St Peter's Community News

Suggested topics (please feel free to add to these in the etherpad):

Personal experience with using software for PB:
- Any shining examples stand out?
- Any frustrations
Case Studies
- Geographical focus (idiosyncrasies we need to take into account)
- Mobile
- Web
Measures of success
- PB has many pieces, which software is best for which piece?
- Setting up a common framework for impact evaluation
- Scalability
- Penetration
- User retention
- Epistemic value
Relevant topics for PB?
- deliberation on entire budgets at once
- local / national
- demand and supply of services & infrastructure
- problem-solving (a la fix my street – requests for more funds to be directed to solve a problem)
- allocating resources for area regeneration
- directing statutory funds to voluntary sector organisations
- Structural funds – national co-funding
- Exploring tradeoffs
Which stages of the PB cycle to focus on?
Probably no universal solutions – but what are the minimum common principles which can be identified and is there a tech solution for them?
Low-hanging fruit – what are the next steps in coming months to take this to the next level?

If you can’t make the call – please feel free to contribute to the discussion via the Participatory Budgeting Google Group.

Tags: pb No Comments »

by Friedrich Lindenberg

Announcing the Where Does My Money Go? Assembly Kit

February 16, 2012 in Releases, Updates

Over the past few months, we’ve made a lot of progress on OpenSpending. The core of the application is now mostly stable and it is getting ever easier to load data into the platform through the web-based dataset editor. Yet, inevitably, this raises a simple question: I’ve imported my data, what next?

Thanks to our API, there can be an infinite number of answers. With the BubbleTree diagram, the Daily Bread application and the transactional spending browser, we have a few simple answers.

But as Michal Škop blogged recently, up to now it has been fairly difficult to use both these widgets and the OpenSpending API to create custom front-ends.

To make things easier, we’ve now created the Assembly Kit. The kit is in fact the source for a newly styled version of the Where Does My Money Go? site that has gone live yesterday. Contained in this is a clean set of templates that can anyone who knows basic HTML can easily use to make a lightweight, white-label budget visualization site, styled according to your own wishes.

A set of widgets are included and can be adapted to another dataset with just a few edits. And since everything runs against the OpenSpending API, you don’t need to run your own database. Instead, you can load your data into OpenSpending.org and then customise the user facing side – for example, you can just use a generic blog or a set of static HTML files.

Our next step in March will be to make it easier for users – especially Journalists – to create custom configurations for the visualizations via a graphical interface, save specific views and share them through a simple embed code. We’ll also work to roll out the mapping support more widely and to create more custom apps on top of the API.

Our goal is to make OpenSpending the easiest way to publish and analyze a government finance dataset – with your help! So please provide us with feedback and contribute your own visualizations to the OpenSpending platform.