EN 
ES Our first and – may we say? – awesome Community Meet-Up of 2024 is now reviewable in video below.
The Meet-up was entitled: The Mexican Experience: Learning from five cycles of participatory budgeting. It features a presentation by Dino Cantú-Pedroza and Diego Emilio Cuesy about the implementation and participation processes in different Mexican cities, including San Pedro, León and Monterrey.
The Meet-up was attended by some 35 government users, developers and other interested people of our community from around the globe.
The contents of the presentation:
A few key points and insights:
- In some cities there has been a long history of analog participatory budgeting, such as in San Pedro Garca Garzia which started organizing it in 2009.
- Five cities where they implemented participatory budgeting:
- Most of the cities did hybrid processes, combining digital with offline voting on projects
- Biggest challenge of all was the implementation of projects: how do you make sure that the city will implement all of the winning projects, and communicates about it transparently? In San Pedro so far there is 100% implementation.
- Lesson: a lot of proposals coming in through the platform is considered a succes, but how to manage the work load of civil servants that have to check the feasibility and factability of all those projects? That’s why we need to design succesful participatory processes having in mind two user groups: citizens and civil servants.
- Resulting change: we have to aim for less but bigger projects that were cost-effective for the administrations to implement. Communication lead succesfully to exactly this change.
- Challenge of CONSUL platform: it doesn’t have a tool to manage all the incoming date and process it in a clear way for administrators to work with and evaluate. It was fixed in Mexico by introducing a CRM (customer resource management) system which helped structure the data
- The Cities Accelerator programme was designed to duplicate San Pedro experience in other Mexican cities