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Budget Party #70

Open mateoclarke opened 8 years ago

mateoclarke commented 8 years ago

A budget simulator tool to help educate community members on how the City operates and collects data on civic priorities from citizens.

Project Repo

original proposal from 2016-06-23 begins below

What problem are we trying to solve?

How might we get broad citizen input on the city budgeting process and move the City towards participatory budgeting?

The City of Austin has shown interest in getting citizens' input in the budgeting process. More recently, the City has included a digital strategy for budget input. However, there is criticism that so far, the participants they reach are predictable and few.

In 2013, the City launched the Budget in a Box board game and sent out around 150 board game boxes to collect citizens results. Feedback from media and policy experts was that the board game is more valuable as a informational tool and doesn't fully meet the goal of empowering participants to "make a difference" in budget decisions because the game doesn't line up with how budget decisions are actually made.

In 2015, Open Austin volunteers created Budget in a Box App, a survey style adaptation of the Budget in a Box Board game. This project was led by Lara Foss inside the City's Public Information Office. There were 1,577 participants and the volunteers were recognized by Mayor Adler for their work.

In 2016, the City chose to purchase a "Budgeting Simulator" software as a service branded by the City as Dollars & Sense from a vendor called "Delib Limited" for $17,095. This app will be open to collect citizen input until July,15, 2016. A major criticism of this tool is that it is targeted at home owners which account for less than 50% of Austin residents. It is similar in approach to the Budget in a Box app but more complex.

Now, through partnership with the Austin Monitor & Glasshouse Policy, Open Austin has the opportunity to iterate on some of our past work to design a Budget Tradeoff Game that could reach more citizens and have a bigger influence on future budget decisions at City Hall.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

So far, I've meet with folks from Austin Monitor and Glasshouse Policy. We have some low-fi sketches (see below) of the game UI.

Grace (who is leading this project from Glasshouse Policy's side) has put together a Google Spreadsheet with details on current budgets for each department.

I want to investigate if there are aspects of the Budget in a Box app that can be reused. Maybe design assets at least cc/ @cuyaproductions? Perhaps some of the app logic itself could be reused, but I'm worried that Ember might have a step learning curve for me personally to get this moving forward with only 6 weeks before the Austin Monitor event. I'm leaning towards a React frontend since that is what I've been using at work recently.

Whiteboard1

Whiteboard2

Basic_UI_Mockup.pdf

What help is needed at this time?

Design! Moving these low-fi sketches towards better mockups in Sketch, Photoshop, whatever would be awesome! I'm planning to work on this at the 7/2 Civic Hack Saturday

diego-codes commented 8 years ago

I'm going to be out of town for the 7/2 hack day, but I'd like to stay in the loop on this.

mateoclarke commented 8 years ago

Started a repo with a few more whiteboards 💩 https://github.com/open-austin/hack-the-budget

mateoclarke commented 8 years ago

Also started a slack channel: https://open-austin.slack.com/messages/hackthebudget/

graceatkins commented 8 years ago

Mateo, Can you add me to the open Austin slack channel? I would love to be a part of the convo.

On Saturday, July 2, 2016, Mateo Clarke notifications@github.com wrote:

Also started a slack channel: https://open-austin.slack.com/messages/hackthebudget/

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/70#issuecomment-230109493, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe/ATSl3ZX9hPPuePzZ_af0rOUxkILttmtqks5qRo5hgaJpZM4JCO_6 .

amaliebarras commented 8 years ago

hey @graceatkins - you can send yourself an invite at http://slack.open-austin.org. Once you're in the channel is called #hackthebudget

amaliebarras commented 8 years ago

if you have trouble, shoot an email to info@open-austin.org and I can add you manually :)

werdnanoslen commented 7 years ago

Added Texas tag, because there have been some recent talks with other cities, but right now the team is focused on Austin.

werdnanoslen commented 6 years ago

Some folks in Houston might be interested in this https://github.com/sketch-city/project-ideas/issues/41

werdnanoslen commented 6 years ago

They also have one idea focused specifically on school district budgeting: https://github.com/sketch-city/project-ideas/issues/51

twentysixmoons commented 6 years ago

Latest Budget Party updates here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yp6dhinvIPINqCtgST_6uj-FqodBGhK1y6BtRZk6v-U/edit?usp=sharing

Lost of work to be done if we want to keep this going for 2018 and make it even more effective! Excited to work with some folks after MozFest.

twentysixmoons commented 6 years ago

Recently we had Iona, a new civic hacker come and work on releasing our curriculum from a PDF into a website. Check out #p-budget-party in our slack for more info.

twentysixmoons commented 6 years ago

We worked more on Budget Party at the Hack Saturday that was today.

@ludocracy and @ionapjolive worked on turning the curriculum into a landing page: Turn Curriculum into HTML with landing page

@knittingdev started to look into getting our marketing site more better built out and desktop ready: https://github.com/open-austin/budgetparty/issues/208

We still need help continuing these efforts. join us in #p-budgetpary in slack.

twentysixmoons commented 6 years ago

Budget party is still ongoing! Recently we had @alexpriceco meet with Generation Citizen and we had a catch-up meeting to go over our next steps. Within the next 2 weeks we intend on having a journey map for how the city collects survey information from the public about the data and where it goes from there.

Recently, we were also informed that Sarah Morris from the Nucleus Learning Network got the curriculum online here: https://github.com/nucleus-network/budgetpartylessons

I still need a dev to Merge the work done by @knittingdev since we still want the marketing landing page updated.