Change Tomorrow is a Portuguese start-up created in 2013 dedicated to the development of solutions based on novel technologies for active citizen participation in municipal administration. The main service of Change Tomorrow is Participare, a cloud-based participatory budgeting (PB) solution for municipalities.

Participare was born from the following observation: although an increasing number of local governments around the world are implementing participatory processes, these are not always successful. Many PB processes fail for lack of participation resulting from a lack of trust in the process. With the goal to improve these processes, Change Tomorrow created Participare, a platform designed to manage the entire participatory PB process for cities. It does so by guaranteeing a credible, reliable and transparent process, ensuring proper participants’ identification, maximizing engagement, and integrating offline and online participation. The platform offers a complete service and centralizes all the different steps of a PB: promotion, registration and identification of citizen, submissions and visualization of proposals, monitoring of project’s implementation, etc.

Partcipare combines a software solution and technical assistance from the Change Tomorrow team. Structured as a SaaS platform, Participare is an easy to use, fast to set-up and low-cost solution which only needs customization instead of development, and where cities pay for what they use and no hosting is needed. It is flexible to adapt to local specificities, multilingual, and costs approximately 300 - 400 USD per month, with prices depending on the number of registered participants. Participare has been adopted by more than 50 municipalities across Europe.

Ovar, a Portuguese city of 55,000 inhabitants, implemented a participatory budgeting initiative in 2015, using the Participare solution. For the 2015 and 2016 editions, the budget allocated to the process was 100 000 euros, which corresponds to approximately 1% of investment budget, 38% of indirect taxes collected. By implementing a PB, the goal of the municipality was to increase citizen participation and interest in local public policies, bring citizens closer and increase trust in the local administration. The total cost of the project was €10.000 euros, including the monthly subscription for the platform, the communication and marketing material expenses. The participatory budgeting was implemented in five phases:

• Preparation and definition of PB rules. The city of Ovar decided that voting was open to anyone that had a connexion with the municipality and was over 16 (either a formal resident or not). The proposals could relate to any subject as long as the proponent was an individual citizen and the proposals would not benefit someone or a specific institution.
  
• Collection of suggestions. Once the rules were set and the platform created, the city communicated via local press, social media and in-person sessions. 16 meetings were organized in the eight parishes of the city. Project proposals could be submitted online and discussed during in-person meetings. Only the 5 top ideas voted in each parish were selected to go to the final vote. 38 projects were collected city-wide.
  
• Technical evaluation of suggestions. After each parish voted for their favourite projects, the municipality worked with city officials to ensure that the projects are feasible and complied with local regulations. Projects’ proponents were involved in this phase. After this technical assessment, 16 projects were approved to go to final voting.
  
• Voting. The proposals were published in a web platform for a period of 1 to 2 months, during which citizens could vote. Each citizen had three votes in order to encourage them to think about their parish but also at a city-level. People had two options to vote: either online or by using home-delivered paper ballots. Results were presented in the online platform for people to know in real time, which projects were winning. At the end of the process, the municipality organized an award session where diplomas were given to proponents to reinforce their recognition.
  
• Monitoring of the projects’ implementation. One final proposal was selected for implementation and the execution of the project can be followed via the online platform.
  

The 16 meetings brought together over 1,000 citizens, 38 proposals were submitted, 13,598 votes, were casted, corresponding to 25% of the city’s population. The Mayor of Ovar, Salvador Malheiro, believes that the initiative contributed to reducing mistrust from citizens and to improve community engagement.

According to the municipality, the following elements were key to ensure the success of the participatory budgeting:

• Active involvement of proponents. The city engaged them to promote their projects: they had to mobilize their fellow citizens to support their initiative. In addition, meetings were organized with the proponents and the municipal technicians responsible for their areas to ensure the feasibility project and that the project was kept unchanged from the initial idea.
  
• To deploy means of participation adapted to all types of public. Typically, it is challenging for the elder to use digital tools. It was key that the municipality offered off-line means of participation by organizing in-presence meetings and sending paper bulletin to each household of the city.
  
• Communications campaign combining traditional media (radio, television, local newspapers…) and social media to ensure citizens’ involvement.
  
• Gamification of the process was key to attract citizen engagement. For example: the municipality promoted a little competition between the different parishes, to see which would manage to have more citizens voting and participate.
  
• Political leadership from the Mayor was a key element to ensure than municipal employees and citizens were on board.
  
• Transparency about the process and disclosing the votes in real-time in the online platform was key to increase trust of the population in the process and to encourage participation.
  
• Having a central platform to improve organization and monitoring of the initiative, to allow cross-referencing the different participation channels and increasing visibility of the process.
  

To know more about Change Tomorrow and Participare:

• www.participare.io
• www.changetomorrow.io
• www.changetomorrowblog.wordpress.com

To know more about the participatory budgeting in Ovar:

• www.op.cm-ovar.pt