Rebuilding two-way trust, city by city (csmonitor.com)
‘Participatory budgeting’ (1980s idea from Porto Alegre, Brazil). A group of citizens gets to decide/vote on where a chunk of the budget gets spent. Paris does $118m per year participatory budget, but receiving 21k ideas from the public each year, checking them for feasability, presenting 260 to the group, and the group chose 104. NYC does $30m decided by citizens (ages 10 and up).
Grassroots engagement, transparency, reduces bias against politicians decisions.