How well cities spend their money is a common theme in many community news and engagement efforts -- but usually this attention occurs only after the budget is finalized. Also, municipal budgets are popular fodder for open government projects, such as the Los Angeles Budget Tool (a recent winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge), and the South Orange, N.J. budget transparency tool launched this year by opengov software provider Delphi.

Some U.S. cities, including New York City, Chicago and Vallejo, Calif., have been experimenting with participatory budgeting -- where citizen participate directly in some aspects of the municipal budgeting process. Does this civic engagement strategy actually work?  

A series of articles published in the Journal of Public Deliberation (vol. 2, issue 8, 2012) explore the practice and effectiveness of participatory budgeting. 

For example, Florida International University researchers Guo Hai and Milena Neshkova researched several case studies to examine the effectiveness of citizen input at four different stages of the governmental budgeting process. Survey data from state (not local) departments of transportation was used. They found:

• Citizen participation is positively correlated with higher organizational performance. State DOTs that engage in municipal budgeting report fewer poor-quality roads and fewer highway fatalities.
• In terms of ongoing road condition, citizen input makes a difference at all stages (except for budget discussion).
• Citizen input is most crucial at the information-sharing and program-assessment stages. It's best to seek public feedback at the beginning and end of the budgeting process. This also yields better performance once the budget goes into effect.

If your city offers participatory local budgeting, this means that budget-based opengov projects, or tools to help people understand the municipal budgeting process, might be especially appropriate for your community. 

But even if your city does not conduct participatory budgeting, there are still many ways to use your municipal budget as a tool to engage your community. Municipal budgets are notoriously complex, cryptic documents, difficult for laypersons to interpret and analyze. Data visualizations, tools to help citizens compare budget options and tradeoffs, year-to-year comparisons, and plain-language commentary and context are just some of the many options to engage citizens with one of the most common types of structured public documents.