Budget Builder Analysis - Conclusions





Overview	BB Use	Power	Participation	Design	Methods	Next Steps

Conclusions

Community Participation & User Input

In the analysis above, an important fourth group was left out because it effectively had no power in this situation: community members outside the development team. Although citizens are regularly claimed to have ultimate power over public institutions through voting, there are many important day-to-day activities of those institutions which are far removed from that power. The development of the Budget Builder was one of those activities. Even though it was created in a public institution, it was developed mostly out of the public eye.

Defining Community
One important factor in attempting to gather community input for this project was the difficulty in defining who was the "community." Each of the three main organizations had their own successively broader definitions of community. The school district administration viewed school principals and budget staff as their community. Cross City included those people, but also added parents, teachers, educational activists, and businesses. Andy and I had an even larger view, which included the previous people, plus staff, students, and anyone else interested in school performance. These increasingly broad definitions, with the large number of people they covered, made it difficult to incorporate community views into the design process. Complicating matters even further is that the decision to make the Budget Builder available on the Internet broadened the definition of community to include people none of us imagined at the beginning, such as people from school districts around the country or, as previously mentioned, the U.S. Department of Defense.

An important question to ask is: Why do those of us working on the project have the authority to make decisions about community participation? A simple answer is that all of us on the design team are community members of our own cities, interested and affected by the public education system. Furthermore, Cross City staff, as educational activists, were deeply involved in grassroots organizing around school budget issues in Chicago and other cities. That gave them the standing to speak about the importance of including people from outside the district administration in budgeting decisions.

Possibly most importantly, after the first round of development, when the Budget Builder had been officially introduced, we demonstrated the site and its features to many groups including the progressive wing of the national teachers unions, people working on school-based budgeting in many cities, and interested people in Seattle. Universally, the project was received with excitement, admiration, and sometimes envy. (People expressed great surprise that we had such easy and open access to the district's budget data, which reinforced the importance of that asset.) Other people who had heard about the site visited it on the Internet and have asked that we develop a version for their school district. The positive response we have received from people who fall under the broad definition of community indicates that our community focus has been in line with the people we are trying to represent.

Barriers to Participation
Participation by potential users during the creation of technical systems is extremely important because the final form of technologies is highly dependent on the input received in early stages of their development. In this case, due to the power held by Joseph Olchefske and the Seattle Schools, they were able to forestall the direct inclusion of community views.

Joseph had his own agenda which didn't exclude community participation, but didn't actively include it. However, his agenda effectively excluded it, since his priorities were to get only principals online and up to speed, and to have the system finished "enough" before including other parties in the process. In addition, he continually pushed the definition of "enough" further into the future, so that community participation was never a realistic option until the system was too far along to get any outside community input in the early stages.

However, Joseph provided a valuable community service by making the district's budgeting data available on the Internet. Although it was never discussed explicitly at the time, Cross City, Andy, and I felt that pushing Joseph too hard on the issue of community participation would have caused him to decide not to work with us. Our assets (funding and technical expertise) were more replaceable than his.

Many other factors also contributed to the *lack of community participation*: Anne Hallett's desire to remain diplomatic, Cross City's inexperience working cooperatively with a school administration, Andy's and my failure to make clear how important early input was to the eventual design, my increasing technical workload and unwillingness to transfer much of it to others, complications of working long distance, the early nature of school-based budgeting in Seattle, and difficulties of organizing and holding community meetings.

Participatory Successes
Despite all of the reasons why community participation was problematic in this project, there are many ways in which it succeeded. From the point of view of the school district, the primary audience for the Budget Builder was school principals and budget staff. Using that definition, participation was very good, as principals and budget staff were regularly involved throughout the Budget Builder development.

Once the definition of community is broadened to include other school staff, parents, students, or even people not directly involved with a school, our participatory record looks weak. However, we did hold a few meetings in early stages with interested parents and teachers union representatives in which we gathered quite a bit of feedback about important principles. Unfortunately, the relationships lacked continuity, since with few exceptions we never met with the same people to check our design with their original ideas.

Most importantly, the members of the design team qualify as community participants.

The Cross City staff, although not residents of Seattle, were in the positions of district outsider, interested parent, educational activist, and others in their home community of Chicago. Much of their experience was directly transferable to the Budget Builder project. They were regularly involved in site design meetings and evaluations.

Andy and I, in addition to being district outsiders and residents of Seattle, were both sensitized to the need for community input into technical development. We constantly used our own experience as community members dealing with government bureaucracies as well as the input we had gathered from others to guide us in the technical work.

Our community-focused work resulted in a product that:

was accessible via the Internet, instead of being distributed on disk or via an internal district system;
was publicly available to anyone, instead of only to principals and district staff;
had more data visible than the district originally envisioned; and
situated the mechanical budget-building tools in a context of explanations, examples, and assistance for users unfamiliar with the district's procedures.

Overall, the community participation we were able to incorporate had a noticeable effect on the final outcome of the project.

Future Participation
Suggestions for future community participation are addressed in the Next Steps section.