Collaborative Study Lab
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Interactive Budgeting TCamp2012 Session Notes
There were so many wonderful sessions at Transparency Camp this year that I wish I could have been in multiple places at once. Unfortunately, tough decisions had to be made and we all may have missed something we wanted to chat about. So in the spirit of sharing ideas and promoting conversation, here are my presentation notes on:
How can municipal spending data be made interactive and uniquely relevant to users, so that it engages them to continuously monitor and use it to improve their communities?I hope others will post their notes and slides so we can go back and see some of the things we might have missed in person. Sunlight Foundation also posted session notes here if you would like to take a look.Presenters:Matthew Hall, Research Intern at OpenPlans @hallm13 Collaborative Study Lab
James McKinney, Executive Director at OpenNorth @mckinneyjames*Disclaimer* These are the outline notes from a presentation and are therefore missing some explanation without the context of participating in the conversation. I’m posting these notes for those who could not attend but may still be interested in the topic.
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Matthew “Michael” Hall’s interview with Chris “Dora the Gov Explorer” Dorobek on the Dorobek Insider radio program. We talk about budgeting transparency at about the 30:56 mark.
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What Gov 2.0 Can Learn from Participatory Budgeting Shareable reposted my article on participatory budgeting’s lessons for the Gov 2.0 movement.
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What Gov 2.0 Can Learn from Participatory Budgeting
Matthew Hall
Researcher at Open Plans
Last week I attended the International Participatory Budgeting conference held in Brooklyn, NY and picked up several key lessons that the Gov 2.0 movement could learn from participatory budgeting. The participatory budgeting (PB) movement is very similar to Gov 2.0 efforts in that they are both designed to improve governance through increased transparency and citizen participation. PB puts into practice, in mostly physical spaces, the principles of open source and online collaboration: radical transparency, voluntary participation and selection of tasks, distributed organizational structures, and so on. The PB movement has also been around since 1989 when it started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, so they have decades of experience in promoting and practicing open and citizen collaborative governance. -
Guidelines for Budgeting Transparency:
Matthew Hall
OpenPlans
The following is a guide to best practices for municipal governments to publish their budgeting/spending data to citizens. These practices should be seen as the basic foundations for government-led Gov 2.0 efforts for civic improvement and not a comprehensive guide to all information and communication technology (ICT) facilitated approaches. This article focuses on transparency efforts, so does not include social media engagement practices. Since many governments have limited resources to devote to Gov 2.0 efforts, this is a list of low intensity methods for jump starting civic innovation. -
Does Budgeting Transparency Increase Understanding?
Matthew Hall
@Hallm13
Does budgeting transparency increase understanding? In a previous post we discovered that sharing the results of budgeting processes, as in spending/budgeting numbers, does not significantly contribute to citizen understanding. Raw spending data is meaningless to citizens without some sort of context to show what those numbers actually mean for their communities. So, how does the city make sense of spending data? When the city decides on spending, what factors do they consider and what information sources are they looking at?
Budgeting decisions are amazing complex, with small changes having repercussions throughout the budget. While open government advocates, like myself, want to include citizens in this process by making them more transparent and participatory, how is that participation going to create civic value without informed contributors who understand the consequences of the decisions they are making? -
Citizens as a Platform for Civic Improvement
Recently the New York City Council passed what some open government advocates see as a “landmark” bill to increase government transparency and citizen access to machine readable data sets. While this legislation is definitely a welcomed triumph for the Gov 2.0 movement and a positive example for “closed” or “inert governments everywhere, should transparency legislation be the primary focus for civic technologists? Some may say that civic hackers obviously need government data sets before they can build civic apps, but should nimble and innovative civic technologists wait on slow moving bureaucracies to lead the way? Should citizens as a platform be just as much of a focus as government as a platform?
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How Do You Measure the Value of Gov 2.0? Great piece about building tools for change and not just for the sake of building.
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Great video about thinking cities
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What Does Open Budgeting Mean for Communities?
Matthew Hall
Providing citizen access to public data is a popular trend among city governments, with NYC recently announcing that every check in their register will now be accessible to the public, but do existing efforts at transparent government spending actually engage citizens and give them a better understanding of their communities? The short answer is not really. The long answer is:
