Conclusions

Power Relationships

To more fully understand the development of a technical system, it is always useful to examine the social structure surrounding the technology and the places where power is concentrated in that system. In the case of the Budget Builder, there were three significant places of power and four people who held that power.

Funding
Most of the *funding for the initial stages of the project* was raised by Anne Hallett of the Cross City Campaign. Because she and her organization brought significant financial resources to the table, their principles strongly guided the direction of the Budget Builder. That community participation was raised at all, that people outside the district administration were considered important users of the system, and that Andrew Gordon and I were brought into the project all sprang from Cross City's focus on strengthening community control of public schools.

However, although it was a unique feature of this project to have the funding come from outside the organization that wanted the technology, we found that it wasn't enough to give us the leverage we needed to include users from outside the schools as participants in the development process. Several times, our *attempts to gather community feedback were resisted* by Joseph Olchefske, the Seattle Public Schools Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Anne, as power-holder via bringing the money, acquiesced to Joseph's requests partly because of diplomatic concerns, partly because she did not realize the importance of early feedback from all users, and partly because her power was overridden by power held by Joseph.

Information
Joseph's power arose because the Seattle School District offered two important features to Cross City, Andy and me: First, it provided a chance for Cross City to interact cooperatively with a major public school district while advancing its school-based budgeting goals. In *other cities where Cross City works*, the districts have not always been so cooperative, particularly about sharing data. Second, the district budget office was instructed to quickly provide all necessary data for the project. Without the data on staff costs and revenues available to schools, it would be nearly impossible to develop accurate budgets for schools. While it would have presented some difficulty for Joseph to replace the contributions of Cross City, Andy and me, it would have been more difficult for us to replace what he could offer.

The school budgeting data are public information, but obtaining that information can be difficult in practice. Even as the main developer on this project, it was challenging for me to get comprehensive listings of data necessary for the Budget Builder. It would likely be more difficult, or effectively impossible, for people outside the system to get access all of that information. Furthermore, Geri Lim, the budget office manager, and later CFO, repeatedly defined data and budgets in development as planning documents that weren't considered public information. In her (and the district's lawyers') opinion, budget data was not public until it had been adopted by the school board. At that point it is unlikely that significant changes to budgets could be made.

A few principals gave us another reason why current, accurate data is important: although principals have nominal control over hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their school budgets, after staff and other relatively fixed costs, they only control several hundred or thousand dollars. Principals repeatedly told us that those small amounts of discretionary money made a large difference in the educational experience they could offer their students. Inaccurate or out-of-date information could easily throw off a budget by more than the amount that principals normally have to play with.

Technical Knowledge
A third source of power was held by Andy and me as the technical developers of the Budget Builder. Our technical expertise allowed us to make suggestions and give technical guidance to everyone in the project as well as giving us the responsibility for implementing the ideas agreed upon in design meetings. Because we were often the ones generating ideas about how the Budget Builder should work, we were able to present community-friendly ideas and have others react to them. Although our ideas weren't always accepted, by coming from a position of technical knowledge, we were in some ways able to set the parameters for the discussions.

Some of the community-focused features we were able to implement included: putting the Budget Builder—including the budget data, forms, and guidelines—*on the Internet* instead of keeping it internal to the district; providing *a context of school-based budgeting explanations and examples*, so that the site was not strictly about the mechanics of budgeting; keeping the site open, without a need for password access, unless a user specifically wants to keep a budget private; and providing a *flexibly designed site* to meet the needs of users with limited or older equipment.

Power Distribution
This project was unusual because of the *separation of responsibilities* and power between three organizations with different agendas. In many technology development projects, the responsibilities lie within the same organization, which ostensibly has goals that all of its members adhere to (or are at least aware of). In many other cases, the technical work may be contracted out to a different organization, but the contractors are under the direction of the original organization.

In this case, each organization had various goals which were not in complete alignment, which prevented a simple, unidirectional approach to a shared goal. Each group was able to derive power from assets that the other groups needed but did not have themselves.

From one point of view, the Budget Builder project can be looked at as an example of potential community participation being stymied by an organization looking to minimize "troublesome" community involvement. Because the Seattle Schools had data which was not easily accessible without their cooperation, we were forced to bend in our demands to include community in the development process.

From a different point of view, the project can be seen as a success for community access, although a first step with much more work to come. The Seattle Schools were going to develop some sort of system to aid principals in their new task of developing school budgets. Because Cross City and GSPA brought a strong community orientation as well as our money and technical expertise, we were able to turn the Budget Builder into a tool that is accessible to a much wider audience than the Seattle Schools ever envisioned.

Overview | Use of the Budget Builder | Power Relationships | Community Participation |
System Design Issues | Evaluation Of Methods | Next Steps

Contents | Introduction | Background | Methods | Description | Conclusion | References