Calgary Experiments With Crowdsourcing Its Budget – "Our City. Our Budget. Our Future"

In many cities, there tends to be a barrier between citizens and the officials that run the city. For Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, much of the division can be blamed on TLAs – or, as he tongue-in-cheekily explained recently, the three-letter abbreviations that dominate the language of city officials, but which aren’t often explained to the regular citizen.

To create a better understanding o the inner workings of the city, Nenshi decided to open the process up and give citizens a more detailed – and comprehensible – look at one of the city’s most important functions: creating the budget.

Last year, months before the city finalized its 2012-2014 budget and business plan, Nenshi and the city launched a citywide engagement process to get citizens to participate in drafting the sort of budget they wanted for their city, an effort dubbed "Our City. Our Budget. Our Future." http://ourcity-ourbudget-ourfuture.blogspot.com/

Nate Berg

Full Story: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/02/understand-citys-budget-write-it/1119/