Electronic Participatory Budgeting: UK Reads Me!

My MWDSI 2009 paper was a day late and a euro short, thanks to Freiburg im Breisgau, but the U.K.'s Headstar.com still thought my discussion of electronic participatory budgeting was worth reading... and publishing! Editor Dan Jellinek boiled it down to an essay (stripping out all those boring old APA citations) and posted it in Headstar's E-Government Bulletin Live online newsletter. Cool!

Participatory Redistricting in Ohio!

Check out the Ohio Redistricting Competition: anyone (in Ohio or elsewhere) can log on and try heir hand at setting the boundaries for Ohio's legislative districts. The Secretary of State worked with a couple of legislators and Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and Ohio Citizen Action to put this contest together. Entrants put together maps that will be scored by these criteria:

1. Compactness (25 points)
   
2. Communities of Interest (25 pts)
   
3. Competitiveness (12.5 pts)
   
4. Representational Fairness (12.5 pts)

The districts also have to meet legal thresholds of population equality (as close as possible), contiguity (point-contiguity not enough!), and provision of at least one "majority-minority" Congressional district (National Voting Rights Act).

Participatory Budgeting: More Resources!

Catching up with notes from the Facebook participatory budgeting group:

Beyond Elections: a documentary by Silvia Leindecker and Michael Fox that asks a very simple question: What is democracy? Chapter 1 is all about participatory budgeting:



Open Budget Iowa: Iowa House Democratic Caucus takes a swing at getting some citizen input on the state budget. Pretty straightforward blog, no apparent effort to compile, summarize, or synthesize the citizen input, just posts with long comment lists. New content appears to dwindle; nothing new posted by organizers since end of January. Plus, as I look at the comments, I see lots of citizens dropping suggestions in the box, but not a lot of response from or interaction with legislators.

The UK Participatory Budgeting Unit has its own YouTube channel! See what those clever Brits are up to!



Tiago Peixoto at ConnectedRepublic.org reviews some state-level quasi-PB initiatives in New York, Arizona, Virginia, Nevada, and Minnesota.

Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia has put up a municipal budget cite to inform citizens and solicit their input in the run-up to his presentation of the city budget in mid-March. The site includes various supporting documents and news stories. Four public fora in February around the city drew 1700 participants. But too many PDFs! The project is supported by U Penn's Penn Project for Civic Engagement.

Open Budget Index: The Open Budget Initiative focuses on budget transparency. They studied 85 countries and found that 80% of those governments fail to give their citizens enough information to effectively monitor their governments' budgets. The U.S. does at least rank fifth, behind the U.K., South Africa, France, and New Zealand. Brazil, the home of PB, ranks eighth (remember, this is federal level, not municipal, where PB is happening).

838: turning random curiosity into publishable work

Quick notes, 838, meeting with Amit:

• Come up with a clear list of requirements. Don't sweat the existence of other systems. Go ahead, catalog those other systems, but make the system that meets your reqs.
• Borrow from large-group collaboration research
• --making room for more voices, allowing all to speak: recall the introductory survey/requirement idea
  
• "social phenomenon is PB itself"
• education! pre-test and post-test: "What do you think are the key issues in the budget?" test for educating
• so these other systems exist -- they haven't been studied yet. The focus that makes the paper worthwhile is studying the system in the context of the constructs.
• But what is your theory? What are you testing? You can't just go out, hand out a survey at random, and get a bunch of data. What is your theory? Go look on AISWorld, find the theory list.
  

Good E-Government Journals

University of Albany's Center for Technology in Government has a nice list of journals dedicated to digital government research:

• Electronic Journal of eGovernment (EJEG)
• International Journal of Electronic Government Research
• Journal of E-government
• The Information Polity
  

CTG also highlights Communications of the ACM, Government Information Quarterly, Information Technology & People, Journal of Government Information, Social Science Computer Review, and The Information Society as good general journals that carry occasional e-gov-relevant research.

Stimulus.Virginia.Gov: Step Toward National Participatory Budgeting

So I just finished reading Susan Tanaka's (2007) discussion of "Engaging the Public in National Budgeting." She gives a good summary of the challenges of taking participatory budgeting (PB) to a national scale (at some level, you still need to be able to look all neighbors in the eye, Sale would remind us).

Then I crack open today's news and read that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine has launched Stimulus.Virginia.Gov, a portal where Virginians (and anyone else interested) can submit ideas for how Virginia ought to use its chunk of the stimulus package (which may arrive on Obama's desk by the weekend).

Gov. Kaine opened the site yesterday. As of 16:08 EST today, I find 763 proposals for all sorts of projects:

• #710: Replace the town of Chilhowie's water tanks ($1,500,000).
  
• #725: Keep Aubrey Temple's hardware store open ($50,000).
  
• #753: Every penny to direct tax relief ($TBD).
  
• #759: Subsidize medication for old folks and fix up hospitals ($100,000,000).
  
• #760: resurface roads in Rocky Run ($100,000).
  
• #762: replace an organization's furnace with new green equipment ($3,000).

Dang—don't tell me citizens aren't eager to participate in something this complex!

I also find a nice little "Export to Excel" button that would allow me to download the whole list of proposals and sort them by dollar amount, proposer, etc. Bless you, Virginia.

Now this isn't national PB; this is just Virginia looking for ideas on how to spend its portion. But Virginia's a big state, and this is a truckload of money. Every state should be soliciting citizen input this way.

Tanaka, Susan. (2007). "Engaging the Public in National Budgeting: A Non-Governmental Perspective." OECD Journal on Budgeting (7:2), 139–177.

Public Administration: "Cooperation, Networking, Governance..."

A little public admin from Frederickson (1999):

"Theories and concepts of the clash of interests, of electoral and interest group competition, of games, and of winners and losers have dominated and continue to dominate political science. Public administration is steadily moving away from these theories and concepts toward theories of cooperation, networking, governance, and institution building and maintenance."

Frederickson totally address Stewart (2007) on his citizen participation game theory. Stewart assumes a competition/conflict is afoot, and often, he may be right. But the public administrator's job is not to play that game, but create a new one in which we operate as collaborators. The evolving mission Frederickson describes justifies offering PA a DSS tool to make that happen.