Skip to content

Project History

Jump to bottom
Victoria O'Dell edited this page Oct 27, 2017 · 1 revision

Overview

Inception in 2016 → Grant Funding in 2017 → Anniversary Event in 2017

💡 Inception | July 2016

Budget Party started July 2016. Glasshouse Policy and Austin Monitor approached Open Austin to create an application for a game night they were hosting. With a month until the event, volunteers got to hacking on an interactive app that would later be called "budget Party".

The game night event had 4 parts as follows: a quick overview of the night, the game - which was done in small groups, and a panel discussion, and judging based on the submitted budgets.

The event went well with over 30 attendees, refreshments, snacks, and good conversation

Original core contributors

💰 Grant Funding | February 2017

Getting the Grant

In February of 2017, Austin Budget Party had been awarded a Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund grant to help design and develop a Digital Mock City Council experience with austinbudget.party.

The goal of the grant was to create an online, open-source, digital budget debate platform and curriculum designed for middle and high school students to explore civic challenges and priorities.

Open Austin contributors partnered with the Capital of Texas Media Foundation, publisher of the Austin Monitor, to improve the budget app, develop a teaching curriculum, and implement the program in 10 pilots schools in Austin.

You can read more on the blog post announcing the grant and from the original project proposal.

Post Grant Period

Not all facets of the grant were met but we walked away from the project with the following

  • An updated Budget Party UI with increased functionality
  • A curriculum was created to go along with the application to provide context for middle school and high school students for understanding how the City Council makes decisions.
  • One Classroom was able to go through the application and curriculum

View the final grant report

The Team

🎉 Anniversary Event | September 2017

After 1 year of having worked on Budget Party, another Budget Party event was created with Open Austin, Austin Monitor, and Glasshouse Policy to educate the general public about budgeting at the city level

The event existed in the following part:

  • Budget Overview Presentation
  • Game Overview Presentation
  • Group Game Play
  • Judging for a winning group
  • Panel discussion

View the post-event blog post.

Clone this wiki locally