Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform
The free, open-source, multilingual digital ballot box for participatory budgeting — used in 150+ PB processes including New York City districts, where digital voting drove participation growth.
The Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform, from Stanford's Crowdsourced Democracy Team, does one democratic job extremely well: run the voting phase of a participatory budgeting process. It supports approval voting, knapsack voting (fit projects under the budget cap yourself — the most honest ballot design in civic tech), and ranked methods, in 13 languages, free and open source.
It has run digital voting for 150+ PB processes, including New York City council districts, where researchers observed that digital ballots accounted for participation growth while paper stayed flat — with the equity caveat that paper still reaches voters digital doesn't, so good deployments run both.
For a neighborhood, it's the missing piece between 'we should let everyone decide' and 'we counted hands at one meeting': a real ballot box that costs nothing and speaks your block's languages.
Neighborhood remix: the ballot box for the block-scale PB cycle on this shelf — every household votes, digital or paper, same weight.
Details
- maker: Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team
- license: GPL-3.0
- repo url: https://github.com/StanfordCDT/pb
- image url: https://texakzqqenzpxawktbgx.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/studio-library/tool-screenshots/stanford-pb-platform-2026-08.jpg
- remix idea: The free multilingual ballot box for very small budgets.
- practice kind: tool
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
A starter build: fork Front Porch Forum's constitution, not its code — real names, one geography, one email a day, a rotating…
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Build prompt
Build: A Living Asset Map
A starter build bridging both new shelves: an asset-based community development map where the assets are neighbors' own declared gifts,…
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Build prompt
Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build prompt
Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team · pbstanford.org
Original source: https://pbstanford.org/
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-toolparticipatory-budgetingvotingopen-source