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17. June 2009 – 15:07 by Bengt Feil
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On Tuesday (16.06.2009) the second participatory budgeting project has been launched in the city of Hamburg (1.8 million inhabitants).
It can be found here: www.buergerhaushalt-hamburg.de
The overall theme of the participation effort is to get citizens involved in the long term planning of the cities budget: How should money be spend in future years? Which city services are important and how can they be organized in a more efficient way?
The platform incorporates a budget planer, discussion forums and other means of participation to cover both the general and specific questions related to the cities budget. Furthermore politicians and budget experts are also involved in process and the discussion.
From June 16th till July 10th the citizens of Hamburg will be able to give their ideas and opinions about the future development of the budget.
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30. October 2008 – 16:07 by Bengt Feil
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In July of this year TuTech started its wide scale test of the-DEMOS Plan tool for participation in urban planning in the city of Hamburg. EU member states are required by law to involve the public in the planning process whenever the environment is concerned and DEMOS-Plan is aimed to directly address this mandatory form of participation. With the actual test phase, which was divided up into two test cases, finished and the first evaluation results in the success of this real world test is very clear and it shows the potential of the tool to address a clearly defined need in the realm of participation and administration.
DEMOS-Plan enables the complete formal participatory process in land use planning to be handled on the Internet. The system takes account of the differing demands of members of the public, companies, government departments and public agencies while at the same time supporting the responsible authority in the administration and consideration of submissions.. More in depth information about the tool itself can be found in my previous article on the matter.
The two test cases in Hamburg demonstrated that all parties involved in urban planning (e.g. the public administration and its different divisions, companies, NGO´s and citizens) were open to and used this innovative tool. For example 80% of all organisations who would normally be supplied with printed versions of all planning material decided to only use the online tool. In the first test case, which was aimed at involving public agencies in the planning process, the involvement of the participating parties was vivid and lead to many important remarks and annotations to the planning material. In the second test, which involved individual citizens, the participation was far stronger than the involvement in paper based planning efforts.
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16. July 2008 – 09:00 by Bengt Feil
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On Wednesday June 9th we started the hot phase of the project BOP. This project aims at transferring the process of formal participation in urban planning to the internet. This kind of participation is mandatory in Germany – Every urban land-use plan etc. has to be public and the stakeholders relevant to this plan as well as citizens are asked to state their opinion. „Bauleitplanung Online – Pilot (BOP)“ employs an online participation platform to transfer the offline process of formal participation in urban planning to the web. Since Wednesday this platform is live and in use by the involved parties.
The project was commissioned by the City of Hamburg and is organized as a pilot case. The goal of this pilot process is to identify the requirements, wishes and expectations which all involved parties have towards an internet based participation process in urban planning. This will lead to further development of the process as well as to the integration in the IT-infrastructure of the whole city region.
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12. June 2008 – 14:24 by Bengt Feil
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In 2004 James Surowiecki in his famous book “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations” discussed at length how collective decisions are made and that they can be much more rational and “correct” than those of a single or few experts. He uses examples form the fields of economy, politics and everyday life to support this point. I will try to describe another case where the wisdom of crowds seems to be working – participatory budgeting.
It is often stated that citizens only try to gain individual advantages and therefore are unwilling to provide ideas about how to consolidate public spending. There is also the argument that the high complexity of public budgeting makes it almost impossible for citizens to take rational and useful decisions about how to change it. But if you look at the results of participatory budgeting projects this does not seem to be the case. Read the rest of this entry »
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