About 100 people bumped and jostled their way to the snack table lined with bowls of popcorn and pretzels. Eager presenters button-holed passers-by. It looked like a middle-school science fair. But the buzz in the room wasn’t over homemade solar system models or photosynthesis; it was the sound of revolutionary civics in action.
Facing that article about poetry is a fascinating story of participatory budgeting in New York City. The scope is small for a place like New York City—$1 Million in each of four city council districts—and participation wasn't huge—"over the past six months, 250 regular New Yorkers jumped into the trenches and dirtied their hands with democracy"—but this seems like a great start. The model for this trial was developed in Brazil.