• Participation by civil society in public expenditure management promises to improve social and economic outcomes while increasing confidence in public institutions. • Participatory budgeting (PB) programmes depend on the effective engagement of three key domestic stakeholders: governments, civil society and legislatures. Participatory budgeting cannot be imposed. • The successful execution of...

BACKGROUND Many approaches to improving health managers' capacity in poor countries, particularly those pursued by external agencies, employ non-participatory approaches and often seek to circumvent (rather than strengthen) weak public management structures. This limits opportunities for strengthening local health managers' capacity, improving resource utilisation and enhancing service delivery...

. To determine desired properties of new mobile phone-based memory aids for seniors, we conducted observations and participatory design meetings. We observed a clinical population of individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) participating in a memory intervention session for a period of six weeks. We then conducted a series of participatory design activities with five normally aging seni...

Purpose The article concerns information literacies in an environment characterised by the two partly competing and contradictory cultures of print and digital. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the ways in which students assess the credibility of sources they use in school, with a particular interest in how they treat participatory genres. Design/methodology/approach An ethnograp...

A study is presented examining the participatory design of digital musical interactions. The study takes into consideration the entire ecology of digital musical interactions including the designer, performer and spectator. A new instrument is developed through iterative participatory design involving a group of performers. Across the study the evolution of creative practice and skill developme...

Geographic information is based on observations or measurements. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed an implementation specification for observations and measurements (O&M). It specifies precisely how to encode information. Yet, the O&M conceptual model does not specify precisely which real-world entities are denoted by the specified information objects. We provide formal semanti...

The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an opaque and arcane process. Participatory budgeting is making inroads in municipalities, but is usually limited to a small fraction of the total budget as its methods do not scale: They cannot handle quantitative budget items nor hierarchical budget construction. Here we apply the Condorcet princ...

Participatory budgeting enables the allocation of public funds by collecting and aggregating individual preferences; it has already had a sizable real-world impact. But making the most of this new paradigm requires a rethinking of some of the basics of computational social choice, including the very way in which individuals express their preferences. We analytically compare four preference elic...

This study utilized a participatory ergonomics approach to examine the ergonomic hazards and reduce musculoskeletal symptoms for librarians in the East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library. A variety of research activities were conducted, including: ergonomics training and tests, observations, work environment and health questionnaires, and focus group discussions. A total of 39 employees from 9 dif...