Community Digital PB in Scotland

Our Digital PB - Research and Learning Programme

Democratic Society are working together with Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) to explore what digital participatory budgeting (PB) might look like for communities in the future. The research is funded by the Scottish Government and will support communities to highlight the needs, challenges and opportunities for running a digital PB process.  The research will conclude at the end of June 2021 and will map out a set of digital support resources tested with communities and a set of recommendations, all of which will be included in a final report.  We will also be establishing a Digital PB Learning Network which will further progress and develop our learning to ensure communities have the knowledge, skills and confidence to use digital tools to support PB going forward.

Our goals for this work are to:

• Explore the challenges and opportunities for communities to access digital tools for PB.
• Establish a ‘Digital PB Learning Network’ for communities as part of PB Scotland. 
• Create resources that support communities to use digital tools for PB and provide guidance on the latest developments and design, including a digital tools appraisal, guidelines and templates.
• Support and facilitate communities in making recommendations for long-term, continuous community access to digital tools, including opportunities and learning for CONSUL, Scotland’s national pilot PB citizen participation tool. 
• Inform the development of a digital engagement infrastructure that takes into account communities needs and supports the Scottish Government’s ambitions for participatory budgeting and community empowerment.

Next steps

We are now in the process of running discovery and exploratory interviews with communities and PB stakeholders across Scotland to find out communities’ needs, challenges and opportunities around digital PB and what recommendations might come out of this for the future for Scottish communities. 

Workshops & testing Digital tools/resources

We are working with 4 community organisations and key stakeholder groups to become part of a ‘Co-production Group’ that can help us determine the need of the community and voluntary sector.

Democratic Society will be working on a series of digital resources including a digital tools appraisal to enable and support communities to do digital PB. These will be explored and tested with our ‘Co-production Group’ to be adapted based on communities’ needs and made available to the wider PB network. 

Digital PB Learning Network

Please look out for an invite in the very near future to be part of a Digital PB Learning Network. We want to ensure that the learning from our research is shared and accessible both online and in a space where discussions can be held. 

If you have any questions about the project you can get in touch with Annie Cook at Democratic Society annie@demsoc.eu or Paul Nelis at SCDC Paul.Nelis@scdc.org.uk