Public Commons

• Open North, a non-profit that creates websites to increase citizen participation in democracy, has built a tool called `citizen budget` to gather public budgeting priorities .

Part of Community involvement Governance and Effectiveness Information and Transparency

Here is Open North`s description of what it does at its site: what-is-open-north.

Open North is a Canadian non-profit that creates websites to increase citizen participation in democracy. We’re building online tools to lower the barrier to entry to active participation, using two main strategies:

1. Improve access to government information

• make it easily available, by pulling it out of dark corners of government websites, taking it out of PDFs and making access to information requests

• make it accessible, by providing context to numbers, explaining legislative jargon and using language everyone understands

• make it relevant, by letting citizens find information specific to their community, interests and situation

In this way, we want to help citizens move from “information I have” to “information I understand” to “information I care about.” Our projects engage at various steps of this process.

2. Make participation easy, fun and meaningful

• work with governments to design new participatory processes and to ensure citizen’s voices are heard
• increase the number of ways citizens can engage with elected officials and government information
• help citizens connect with each other and organize around issues they care about

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