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Participatory budgeting (PB) is already well established in Scotland in the form of community led grant-making yet has recently transformed from a grass-roots activity to a mainstream process or embedded 'policy instrument'. An integral…
The challenging task of embedding innovative participatory processes and technologies within local government often falls upon local council officers. Using qualitative data collection and analysis, we investigate the ongoing work of…
The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm for deciding the funding of public projects given the residents' preferences, which has been adopted in numerous cities across the world. The main focus of PB is designing rules,…
Natural language processing (NLP) tools have the potential to boost civic participation and enhance democratic processes because they can significantly increase governments' capacity to gather and analyze citizen opinions. However, their…
Local governance meeting records are official documents, in the form of minutes or transcripts, documenting how proposals, discussions, and procedural actions unfold during institutional meetings. While generally structured, these documents…
As multiple crises threaten the sustainability of our societies and pose at risk the planetary boundaries, complex challenges require timely, updated, and usable information. Natural-language processing (NLP) tools enhance and expand data…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) offers a democratic process for communities to allocate public funds across various projects through voting. In practice, PB organizers face challenges in selecting aggregation rules either because they are not…
We study a generalization of the standard approval-based model of participatory budgeting (PB), in which voters are providing approval ballots over a set of predefined projects and -- in addition to a global budget limit, there are several…
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to handle complex decision-making tasks, yet their ability to perform structured resource allocation remains underexplored. Evaluating their reasoning is also difficult due to data…
Participatory urban planning is the mainstream of modern urban planning and involves the active engagement of different stakeholders. However, the traditional participatory paradigm encounters challenges in time and manpower, while the…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which voters decide how to allocate a common budget; most commonly it is done by ordinary people -- in particular, residents of some municipality -- to decide on a fraction of the municipal…
Formal rules and policies are fundamental in formally specifying a social system: its operation, boundaries, processes, and even ontology. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of formal policy in collective knowledge creation, game…
Research on customer satisfaction has increased substantially in recent years. However, the relative importance and relationships between different determinants of satisfaction remains uncertain. Moreover, quantitative studies to date tend…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is revolutionising the way both professionals and laypersons operate in the legal field. The considerable potential for NLP in the legal sector, especially in developing computational assistance tools for…
Many recent improvements in NLP stem from the development and use of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) with billions of parameters. Large model sizes makes computational cost one of the main limiting factors for training and…
In this survey, we review the literature investigating participatory budgeting as a social choice problem. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which citizens are asked to vote on how to allocate a given amount of public…
Language is the medium for many political activities, from campaigns to news reports. Natural language processing (NLP) uses computational tools to parse text into key information that is needed for policymaking. In this chapter, we…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…