PBNYC Voting Outreach and Platform: Design Challenge

[sonyabea]

What problem are we trying to solve?

Last spring, during Cycle 6 vote week for Participatory Budgeting, NYCET texted 35k people to let them know about voting. 80% were people of color, and 79% of the people who responded were people of color. So, we did alright at getting people of color to respond to us. BUT, when we crossed who we texted made it through the platform and actually voted.... it was only 45% people of color.
So .. there is something about the process that is not encouraging PoC to vote, even though they’re responding to our outreach at almost the same rate as white people.
Programmatically, what we are doing is just not texting white people and doing twice as many total people, to make up the difference. But, we’d like to do a deep dive (while the system is live) and have folks analyze and look into design reasons why people might be dropping off.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

Participatory Budgeting equity and members of marginalized communities who want to have a say in how our city's budget is spent.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

What is Participatory Budgeting?

Participatory Budgeting is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It’s grassroots democracy at its best. It helps make budget decisions clear and accessible. It gives real power to people who have never before been involved in the political process. And it results in better budget decisions—because who better knows the needs of our community than the people who live there?

More than 1,500 cities across the world have adopted Participatory Budgeting (or PB), like Chicago, Boston, and Greensboro. To find more information on how the concept has worked elsewhere, visit Participatory Budgeting Project.

Through Participatory Budgeting, community members – like you – directly decide how to spend at least $1,000,000 of the public budget in participating Council Districts. Share your ideas on the map for capital projects. Community members can propose and vote on projects like improvements to schools, parks, libraries, public housing, and other public or community spaces. After you submit your idea on this Idea Collection Map, your idea will be given to community volunteers, called Budget Delegates. Budget Delegates work in your district to turn ideas into real proposals for a ballot, with input from city agencies. These proposals will be up for a community-wide vote in the spring.
How does it work?

Council Members choose to join Participatory Budgeting New York City (PBNYC), giving at least $1 million from their budget for the whole community to participate in decision-making. It’s a yearlong process of public meetings, to ensure that people have the time and resources to make informed decisions. Community members discuss local needs and develop proposals to meet these needs. Through a public vote, residents then decide which proposals to fund.

This year, you can vote for as many as five of your favorite PBNYC project proposals on your district ballot. Each participating Council Member guarantees funding for the projects that receive the most votes, until their PB funding runs out.

There’s a PBNYC Citywide Committee — made up of individuals, community organizations, and Council Members — which helps guide the process and supports PB across the city. The Committee proposes rules for the process each year, which are formalized into a Rule Book adopted by the City Council. Check out this year’s Rule Book to learn more about our goals, guidelines, and eligibility criteria.
What kind of projects can be funded?

Community members can propose projects like improvements to schools, parks, libraries, public housing, and other public or community spaces with the use of certain “discretionary funds.”

Discretionary funds are money that a City Council Member allocates. There are two types of discretionary funds. Expense funds are used to pay for salaries and services. Capital funds are used to pay for physical infrastructure — “bricks and mortar” projects, like the construction, renovation or repair of city-owned property.

For the time being, PBNYC only deals with capital money.
More info:
https://council.nyc.gov/pb/
Scripts we used for Outreach: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnB6BHFYfFWzQAtAWUwaMgh_uA9qzGQU--GlN6JeHeQ/edit?usp=sharing

Voting Platform:
https://pbnyc2018.d21.me/

Shared Google Doc / Where we could put report:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uN6IYSt9gnkMq-v9KmNBtvq3e3emHXeMJJPTnZLZJwk/edit?usp=sharing

What help is needed at this time?

Smart designers

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

We would like to create a report on recommended improvements to the online voting platform and SMS outreach program to improve participation by communities of color.

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

[email protected]

Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas 👶

Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing Progressive HackNight community. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).

• Create this idea issue
• Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
• Start the conversation about this new idea on Slack (this project uses #general )
• Respond with at least one update on this issue within the next month

Checklist for ACTIVE projects 🔥

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Progressive HackNight Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

• Post an update at least once a month to this issue. Use BASEDEF for ideas, but it's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If there's no activity for two months, that's no problem, life happens. We'll just label this as backlog so others know you'll get back to it when you have the time. If nobody hears from you at all in more than two months, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
• Create a GitHub repository and Slack channel for work.
• Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.
• Create a team for your core contributors
  • This will make it easier for you to manage your github repo access. People on a team have the same level of access. Admin access will allow your trusted contributors to make changes as needed.
  • You can remove and add people to your team as needed.
  • Note: You can also allow collaborators outside of your team and give them more limited access.
• Create a Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage to share larger files
  • Github and Data.World are good for code and data, respectively, especially when you need version control. But they're not good for very large files, documentation, articles, etc. A cloud storage option will allow you to easily share, create, and collaborate on documents with your team and help organize ideas and thoughts.
  • Doing this early on can help your team stay organized and to onboard new contributors who wouldn't have access to files you all have shared over email.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team with an email to [email protected] or come find an organizer at a HackNight. We're here to help bring great ideas to life!