Jose M. Lavin

On deciding how to decide: Designing participatory budget processes

Participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities all around the world. The underlying idea is to allow citizens to participate in the allocation of a municipal budget. Many advantages have been suggested for such experiences, including legitimization and more informed and transparent decisions. There are many conceivable variants of such processes. However, in most cases both its design and implementation are carried out in an informal way. In this paper we propose a methodology to design a participatory budget process based on a multicriteria decision making model.

Participatory Processes and Instruments

In many democracies, disillusionment with government handling of issues has led to greater use of participation processes in public decision making. In this chapter, we review key concepts in participatory democracy, describe some of the main participatory instruments and identify the tasks included in them, as a basis for later inclusion in a web-based architecture for participation support.

ePBPM: a graphical language supporting interoperability of participatory process

In recent years, there has been an increase in the desire by citizens to participate in public decision-making. This has led to the emergence of numerous participatory processes across the world. A participatory process may be described as a set of participatory common tasks satisfying certain constraints. The design of such processes may become a complex task for inexperienced individuals. We develop an architecture to support distributed decision making that allows for executing most participatory processes available and propose a method to design participatory processes filling only a simple form allowing its further modification through a graphical interface. To do this we rely on business process management systems, using the BPM standard notation (BPMN).

Prototype application using XBRL for financial statements according to IFRS in Ecuador

This paper presents a study for generate digital business reporting using the language XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) and its applicability in Ecuador. XBRL is a common language for the exchange of financial information, a specialized version based on XML. This standard has been implemented in Europe, USA, Canada, Oceania, Asia and some countries in Latin America, Ecuador have not adopted XBRL standard yet. The goal of this paper is to evaluate XBRL and if its applicable to Ecuadorian SME, to achieve this purpose a software prototype was developed for generate XBRL files, using the chart of accounts published by “Superintendencia de Compañías del Ecuador” and adapting the XBRL taxonomy for SMES from Spain to Ecuador

Decision support services: A framework for distributed decision making over the Web

There has been a raise in the desire to participate in governmental decisions by citizens in recent years. This has motivated the emergence of hundreds of participatory instruments that facilitate the transmission of citizen concerns and desires. Similarly, there has been an increased use of information and communication technologies allowing citizens to contact and provide their preferences to the politicians. We develop here an architecture to support distributed decision making, allowing to construct and implement most participatory processes available. It is based on a standard that enables information exchange among various stages of the process, using XML standard and Web services.

AYNIKUY: a system to support participatory budgets in tungurahua

In this work, we present a system to support participatory budget elaboration in Tungurahua (Ecuador). For this, we integrate several methodologies related with participatory budget elaboration support, obtaining a configurable tool capable of modeling different types of participatory processes and organize these through networks and workflow tasks. This tool can use own services or external web services for implementation purposes.