Description of the project

Deciding on a budget can be seen as a process for a community to determine its collective priorities and how to allocate existing resources to those priorities, or determine that more (or less) resources are needed. While example below is for money, it can be used for budgeting both the money and time, or even some other resource.

The tool would do the following process:

1. First, the user sees up to 10 different segments of the budget, with general descriptions of what each segment contains, but without any numbers of how many of what is included in each budget.
2. Then, the user is asked to select (drag) how much they think each segment is of the overall budget (in terms of % or $), from the overall budget (the size of overall budget is given), in the bar widget.
3. User is shown one more bar widget to select what they think each segment should be.
4. After this, the tool shows them real current sizes of segments with yet another read-only bar widget.
   • Moreover, now for each segment detailed numerical information is presented, like number of people employed/payed in that segment, etc. And some other metrics to understand better the size.
5. User is with another bar widget now asked to provide their final suggestion of how large those segments should be.
   • If they make a segment smaller than what currently the segment is, they can pick from proposed/current ideas what to cut, or offer their own ideas.
   • If they make a segment larger than what currently the segment is, they can pick from proposed/current ideas what to add to the segment, or offer their own idea.
   • They can make overall budget larger or smaller then what current budget is. This is shown to give them feedback to decide if they also want to propose larger budget overall, or maybe make some other segments smaller (so increase is just temporary).

The segments in the bar widget should include both absolute ($) and relative (%) amount each segment takes. The bard widget could be as simple as one horizontally stacked bar where you drag each segments. But for final input this might be too imprecise or crowded (together with suggestions on what to add/remove), so one could use this as read-only summary, while having then individual segments listed where you can pick exact amounts by typing them in and engage with what to add/remove. This could also work by expanding the simple view if somebody wants to be more precise, but also allow quick feedback on the budget if you want the simple view and just use it.

Results from multiple users can then be averaged to get the final proposal for the budget.

This can work also that instead of current/last year budget used as a reference, a budget proposed by some body can be used, and users can then approve it as-is or suggest changes.

This can also work for large budgets through recursion: first top-level budget segments are done, and then you could recurse into each segment and redo it with sub-segments, and so on. This works great also that you can make overall segment smaller or larger and then this is reflected on a higher level as well.