From online to offline participation and viceversa : a software platform for new political practices

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a way for citizens to decide directly over the public expenditures. Every year people choose priorities and vote for concrete projects, rather than representatives and long-term political programs. This participatory process fits with the idea-based forms of online participation, but in PB they have to be “embedded” into a democratic process where the collaborative ideas are more likely to be financed than the individualistic ones. PBs can generate more social cohesion, foster citizens to live "smarter" and perhaps promote a more civic use of the web. Indeed, it also shapes the design of the web platform which supports the offline process. In this paper we present this original interaction between offline and online democracy, resulting from the enactment of the PB in four different local communities, and we outline the functionalities of a dedicated software. We finally discuss first outcomes of these early experiences, and draw some directions for future work.