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Co-Working with Library Users
The Helsinki City Library participatory budgeting project was a collaboration between the city library organisation, the technology company Emobit and Avanto insight. Emobit had previously opened up Helsinki City financial statements data and published them as a visualisation on the Open Spending.org platform. Avanto insight again became responsible for designing the participatory budgeting process. The project involved setting up a Finnish website with the theme, osallistuvabudjetointi.fi, which was used to communicate and document the proceedings. Everything was done in as open a manner as possible, to allow the audience to participate in the planning and learn from our experiences. As another part of the project, Open Spending was used to create visualisations from the City library financial data. Besides sharing the links in social media, we actually presented the visualisations to live audiences in workshops. The participants reacted with curiosity and interest, and, according to the feedback, the colourful boxes view in Open Spending really helped people to understand the numbers more easily. The budget propositions were pilot projects that were planned on the basis of hundreds of ideas from library users, who were asked to think of the library of their dreams. In the end, after three workshops, participants had discussed and voted on their favourite four out of eight propositions, which will be funded and executed in 2013. For example, one project will bring children’s birthdays into the library and another project aims at creating silent space for relaxation inside the library, in contrast to how the situation has developed over a long period of time. A Good Beginning with Big Possibilities
In addition to the New Democracy forum for Sitra and the City library project, a third process was organised in Tampere. Demola, an innovation platform that brings together students and companies to solve real business cases as problem-based learning, was the first case of a Finnish company involving its community in a participatory budgeting process. Students created “education that your teacher would not think of� for themselves, as the slogan stated. To sum up participatory budgeting in Finland in 2012, there 123