Technology & Democracy Workshop: Participatory Budgeting Processes and Tools

Date: 

Tuesday, February 6, 2018, 4:00pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

Ash Center Conference Room, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Suite 200N, Room 226
Join Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellows to develop your digital toolkit. This is a hands-on workshop; participants are expected to arrive ready to learn and practice a new skill.
 
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It’s grassroots democracy at its best. PB is simple in concept, but requires real commitment and time from city staff. In many places, the entire PB process runs throughout most of the year, with several phases, before starting all over again the next year.
 
In this workshop you'll learn about several of these processes and the tools that support them. We'll be focusing on one tool in particular, a map based data collection platform called Shareabouts, used for collecting initial ideas from community members in some PB processes. Workshop participants will design and deploy their own Shareabouts PB maps.
 

Mjumbe PoeLed by: Mjumbe Poe is co-founder and CTO of FixList, a company dedicated to leveraging open data to help people make smarter, more impactful investments in the built environment. Prior to joining FixList in 2016, Mjumbe served as a Digital Services Architect at the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation. In 2012, he started at OpenPlans, where he worked on projects that encouraged city residents to get involved in planning for the future of their cities. Find him on Twitter @mjumbewu.
 
Registration is required!  This event is capped at 18 people.

Things to Bring:  A laptop will be required to follow along with the interactive portion of the workshop.

The Ash Center's Technology and Democracy Workshop Series are hands-on, cocurricular events designed to help HKS students develop real-world technology skills. Led by a network of technology practitioners, participants spend 3 hours working together and with the workshop leader to learn how to apply technical skills to impact real-word scenarios.