Participatory budgeting processes are among the most illustrative, real-life experiences of participatory democracy. Participatory Budgeting (PB) has its beginnings in the late 1980s, when some Brazilian cities started to experiment with processes of citizen participation in decisions about how to better allocate part of the city’s budget. Although PB takes different forms, they can all be considered as refining the following base process: residents of a city propose spending ideas, volunteers or delegates develop those ideas into proposals, residents then vote on the proposals, and the government finally implements the winning projects. Since the 1980s, PB processes have spread around the world as a set of administrative reforms and, more recently, as a “best practice” in mainstream international development.

AppCivist-PB helps users assemble proposal making and selection workflows, using service-oriented archi- tecture (SOA) principles. The composition principles of SOA allow for various implementations and instances of these workflows, including the possibility of integrating and linking different workflows for the same PB campaign. For example, a city might create and manage its own workflow to receive proposals and facilitate deliberation and voting by registered residents; at the same time, citizen groups (typically activists) can create their own, independent, workflows to co-create, develop, and promote proposals for the city, following their own collaboration practices. Compared to traditional SOA, AppCivist-PB distinguishes itself by enabling the assembly of software services dedicated to the support of online-facilitated participatory democracy by and for relevant citizen assemblies.