Belo Horizonte participatory budgeting

from Communications of the ACM April 2010, Vol 53, No 1.

Belo Horizonte did an online vote on whether to spend eleven million dollars on:

1. a new sports complex
2. a library
3. streeet renewal
4. commerfcial center regeneration project

500,000 votes were cast and the sports complex won.

This has been done every year since 2006, and just recently, they introduced phone voting. (I will be preparing a Thoughtful Thursday piece on participatory democracy in Brazil, and I just found Tiago Peixoto's paper on e-Participatory Democracy in Belo Horizonte.)