Last summer I looked at an interesting project in America called A Balancing Act. It’s aim is to display a city’s budget in a straightforward manner, highlighting what is spent where.
What makes the app particularly interesting is its interactivity. It doesn’t just display the information for you but allows you to play around with it so you can tweak it according to your own preferences.
Of course, this isn’t fantasy government, you have to keep your budget in the black, so it forces people to think about the kind of compromises our public officials must make.
Gamifying participatory budgeting
It’s a nice example of how governments can encourage greater participation and involvement by citizens in the budgeting process. Another nice example was launched recently in New Orleans.
The Committee for a Better New Orleans launched The Big Easy Budget Game to encourage citizens to test out their own budgets for the city. The game uses open data from the city to underpin the budgets that citizens try and develop.
Each ‘player’ has $602 million to play around with, with the only requirement that they balance the books, given the government’s responsibilities, how they spent their previous budget and the priorities of the player.
A level of control
A degree of responsibility is added to the game via each department having a minimum spending level imposed upon it, whilst certain funding routes (such as federal sources) are forbidden.
The developers hope to use the data from the game to create a crowdsourced budget called ‘The People’s Budget’, which will be released alongside the real city budget announced in 2017.
The project joins a growing band of attempts at better engaging citizens in the operations of government. Whilst it isn’t really participatory budgeting in the sense that citizens have an active role to play in how government budgets are drawn up, it does nonetheless give a greater awareness to the compromises necessary.
In that sense, it and others like it are to be trumpeted for the work they do.
