SBP Financial Services Manager Patrick Scott is calling all armchair comptrollers to a brainstorming session aimed at getting the town out of the funk and into some innovative ideas ...

Have you ever criticized the Council of your Town for monies that in your mind have been wasted?
Have you ever had a constructive "BRAIN-WAVE" in regards to how the Town could save your tax dollars?
Do you have a specific capital project that you would like to see undertaken that would benefit a segment of our Town?
If you answered "YES" to any of the foregoing, this meeting is for you.
[ via Public Input prior to commencing their 2006 Budget ]

I have a cautionary tale to add to this. Years ago I had the wonderful opportunity to lunch with Mr Roy Romanov, he who was later famous as the Liberal task-force fact finder on the state of healthcare, but at that time the forward-thinking net-savvy Premier of Saskatchewan and famous to me because his government in Saskatchewan had succeeded a government that had conducted a very very interesting early experiment in participatory democracy.

This infamous project had installed text terminals in shopping malls where anyone could fiddle with the Saskatchewan budget data, using the real software, using real data, you could finnagle the spending any which way you wanted. Their ploy was two-pronged, on one side to show the tax-payer that it is not so easy as you'd thought to cobble a budget that pleases everyone, and an additional hook where all these terminals were networked and any 'interesting' solutions to the budget were surrupticiously piped back to the Regina legislature.

So, at our lunch during the Roadwork conference on the People Issues in the Future of the Internet, well, I just had to know: Do tell! Did it work?

"Yes. It worked. It worked a little too well," Premier Romanov explained, "We did indeed see many innovative and viable budget solutions submitted to these terminals, but the government of the day chose to ignore them all, and that," Mr. Romanov told me, "was how our party came to power!"