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July Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap-Hacking the Budget

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Last month Open Austin had a unique lineup of speakers. Our topic was Hacking the budget and we had Grace Miller with GlassHouse policy explain how the city budget can be influenced by the community. We also had Brandon Latham-Jones the outreach Director for District 4, Kerry O’Connor from the Innovation Office, and Robert Friedman from the Mozilla Foundation.

Budget Breakdown

Grace Atkins from Glasshouse Policy gave a presentation on why education around city budgeting is necessary. Glasshouse policy is a think tank in Austin that works to engage the general public around public policy. They help to create a more responsive and representative government. They notice that critical decisions are being made at the local level and wants others to understand and engage with those decisions.

View and/or download the presentation that Grace gave.

Why the Budget?

Grace said that decisions around city spending aren’t just big, vague, and ignorable. City spending decisions impact our daily lives and go largely unnoticed due to inaccessibility to the general public. To breakdown barriers for understanding the budget, Grace pointed out that we have to be engaged and learning both in-person and online

Working to Gamify the budget

With that in mind Glasshouse Policy and Austin Monitor have teamed up for a budget game night that’s happening tomorrow, August 16th at 6:00pm.

Austin Monitor is a locally focused government reporting website. They wants to provide locals with a clear picture of what is going on in Austin. They do this by reporting in an intentionally neutral tone that helps readers make their own judgments on local politics.

They believe that by collaborating to gamify the budget they can help folks understand where and how city money is spent and where it comes from. This is just one step to allowing more people to get involved and influence decisions that go into make the city budget.

Past involvment with volunteers, notably the Budget-in-a-Box app, has made the City of Austin rethink how they present the budget and continued engagement. Currently the city has a different budgeting platform for citizen engagement, Dollars & Sense. Though similar to Budget-in-a Box, Dollars & Sense prompts users to enter home value. An action that the rest of the experience then relies on to illustrate tax and utility bill changes.

The game night and newest iteration of a budgeting app that Open Austin is helping to build, ensure that the conversation around participatory budgeting and citizen engagement continues.

Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund

Robert Friedman came to introduce Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund to the community. Friedman said that Mozilla was in town to take advantage of the Google Fiber network in Austin. They hope to Build and fund educational resources that use gigabyte speed connections to advance learning opportunity for young people, explore big data, synchronized collaboration, and more.

If you’re interested in developing in the education sphere then Mozilla has a fund allocated for prototyping and growing projects out.

For more information contact Robert Friedman via email at robert@mozillafoundation.org

Open Government Partnership Update

Kerry O’Connor from the Innovation Office gave us an update on the Open Gov Partnership that the city accepted earlier this year. Kerry informed the group that we are the only U.S city apart of a subnational pilot program for Open Government and the program currently has us paired with Ireland with whom we support and share knowledge with. Open Austin, Leadership Austin, Vision Zero ATX, and the City of Austin are helping push this program forward.

For the partnership the city not only declare its commitments for being more open, it is also held more accountable. Austin have 1 year to put in place any commitments that we come up with and they must be co-created with civil society.

During ATX Hack for Change a site was launched for the campaign and currently the team needs some help updating it among other task for their campaign to commitment.

If you’re interested in getting involved there is an [OpenGov channel in the Open Austin Slack] (https://open-austin.slack.com/messages/opengovpartnership/) where you can ask questions and engage.

View Kerry’s Full Presentation

Direct Democracy

Braden Latham-Jones- D4 Outreach Director gave a quick presentation on budgeting.

Braden explained our strong manager, weak mayor system in Austin and described how the manager purposes a budget to city council that is then amended and improved.

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