Supporting community access to digital participatory budgeting tools in Scotland Report 2021

Digital PB Resources

You can find a set of resources to support participatory practitioners to do digital participatory budgeting (PB) and engagement with people in their communities here

Our Digital PB - About Research and Learning Programme

Democratic Society worked together with Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) to explore what digital participatory budgeting (PB) might look like for communities in the future. The research was funded by the Scottish Government to support communities to highlight the needs, challenges and opportunities for running a digital PB process. The research concluded at the end of June 2021 and mapped out a set of digital support resources tested with communities and a set of recommendations, all of which will be included in this final report. As part of this work a Digital PB Learning Network willl be established which will further progress and develop our learning to ensure communities have the knowledge, skills and confidence to use digital tools to support PB going forward.

Our goals for this work were to:

Explore the challenges and opportunities for communities to access digital tools for PB.
Establish a ‘Digital PB Learning Network’ for communities as part of PB Scotland.
Create resources that support communities to use digital tools for PB and provide guidance on the latest developments and design, including a digital tools appraisal, guidelines and templates.
Support and facilitate communities in making recommendations for long-term, continuous community access to digital tools, including opportunities and learning for CONSUL, Scotland’s national pilot PB citizen participation tool.
Inform the development of a digital engagement infrastructure that takes into account communities needs and supports the Scottish Government’s ambitions for participatory budgeting and community empowerment.

Digital PB Learning Network

Please look out for an invite in the very near future to be part of a Digital PB Learning Network. We want to ensure that the learning from our research is shared and accessible both online and in a space where discussions can be held.

If you have any questions about the project you can get in touch with Annie Cook at Democratic Society annie@demsoc.eu or Paul Nelis at SCDC Paul.Nelis@scdc.org.uk

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