An extremely interesting effort in a very difficult environment, Santa Cruz’s recnetly concluded online participatory budgeting campaign recently earned national acclaim through a “Gov’t 2.0″ award. Faced with a $9.2 million deficit in the early spring, the City Manager spoke with Peter Koht, the city’s Econ Dev Director, about creating a website that would engage residents in helping to make some difficult trade-off decisions.
Working with the locally based web firm, UserVoice, Koht and his team developed a site that combined both idea submission and voting functionalities. By the end of the 6-week “open” period, the site had over 4,000 unique visitors - constituting around 8% of the city’s total population - a number, as Koht notes goes “much further than our public meetings”. To see a fuller case study on this project, see our “Projects in CA” page, and search “Participatory Budgeting”.