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Development in the 21st century demands access to information. At a time of tight budgets, libraries offer a more efficient, smarter way of doing development. Most countries around the world, regardless of their size or level of development have public libraries. Beyond Access is starting a movement to make them all hubs for economic and social change. We believe that libraries power development.

Series of articles in support of the Self-Directed Services and Personal Budgets project in Australia

Across the country, and throughout the world, many large and small groups of individuals and families, in partnership with businesses and governments, are in the process of making a new system - where people know what they are entitled to and can allocate the money that is assigned for their benefit.. This system is called Self-Directed Support, or Consumer-Directed Care. Variations of these terms are used in Education and Health Care. Internationally, this trend towards personalisation of funding is well-advanced. In Australia it is beginning in disability, accident compensation, aged care and soon in technical and vocational education. But Australian governments and institutions have been very slow to pick it up. We aim to pull them into the 21st century.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. Most examples involve city governments that have opened up decisions around municipal budgets, such as overall priorities and choice of new investments, to citizen assemblies. In other cases, states, counties, schools, universities, housing authorities, and coalitions of community groups have used participatory budgeting to open up spending decisions to democratic participation.

This publication draws on examples of public engagement in city and county budgeting throughout California and describes six general approaches that local agencies use, often in strategic combination, to involve residents in the budget process.

We support public sector and community groups in developing participatory budgeting processes in their local areas within the UK. We are working with the Department for Communities and Local Government in rolling out and supporting their programme of participatory budgeting pilots.

The fundamental question revolves around what interest rate to use to calculate the cost in today's dollars of the government's future receipts. The government makes loans today and receives interest payments and principal repayments over a period of as much as thirty years. The only way to make a fair comparison between different loan programs, or between a grant program and a subsidized loan program, is to calculate the cost in today's dollars.

CACS is the first organization in history to mine California's vast records and successfully construct an organizational mapping of the several thousand agencies, departments, councils, committees, branches, sections, divisions, and subdivisions-many of them redundant-within California's executive branch. This research base and user-friendly online map will enable CACS to create the clearest case for establishing better governance.

California Common Sense is a Stanford-based nonprofit using Silicon Valley technologies to open government finances to the public, engage citizens in data-driven discourse, and catalyze a grassroots movement for more effective and efficient governance.

Imagine a world in which ordinary citizens are invested in their governments and take ownership of them by virtue of actually knowing a) how government works and b) how their tax dollars are used for public services. We at CACS see that world vividly and are guided by the vision that solutions to major local and state problems will stem from the marriage of transparency and engagement. The innovative technologies we use open up government, expose its excesses, draw its shareholders-particularly young people-into the political process, and improve the efficacy of services on which citizens rely.

The California Budget Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research group working to improve public policies that affect low- and middle-income Californians through independent research, budget and policy analysis, and public education. Since 1995, the CBP has served as a resource for policymakers, advocates, community leaders, interested citizens, and the media.

OUR MISSION: The California Budget Project engages in independent fiscal and policy analysis and public education with the goal of improving public policies affecting the economic and social well-being of low- and middle-income Californians. The CBP believes that information can help give voice to those who often go unheard in budget and policy debates. "Knowledge," as the saying goes, "is power." Since 1995, the CBP has worked to make the budget more understandable and to shed light on how budget and related policy decisions can affect the lives of low- and middle-income Californians.