The participatory budgeting model is attracting great interest nationally and internationally. This is shown by recent examples from Europe: in Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris and Rome, budgets were planned by the citizens themselves. Participatory budgets have also been developed in the USA, for example in Vallejo, San Francisco, St. Louis and Boston. An international consortium is taking up this interest in the “CivicBudget” project. A web-based platform is intended to simplify the process of developing a participatory budget. Current platforms are often limited to motivating people to participate. Participants are supposed to work together in a consensus-oriented way. Moreover, the development of a participatory budget relies almost exclusively on public administration. Often, the latter is overburdened with organising and implementing the process. The CivicBudget platform will contain all the important steps for planning public budgets: Developing proposals, collaborating, proposing budget, voting and monitoring expenditure. <\/p>\n
As a further development, CivicBudget is based on a platform that was developed by App-Civist together with Social-Apps-Lab. The Centre for Information Technology and Research Related to Society at the University of California and Inria@Siliconvalley were involved. The design of CivicBudget will be open source. Building on its experience with civic participation in Germany, nexus will identify user needs and work out market opportunities. In a first step, the nexus team will analyse the market in Germany and Europe. Cities and municipalities will be actively involved in the development of the platform. <\/p>\n