Every year in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, thousands of people get together to talk about projects they want to see in their neighborhoods. They hone their ideas and come up with specific pitches for new projects or programs. Then, they all get to vote and spend $71.5 million—or 20 percent of the city’s annual budget—on the stuff they like the best.

Could something similar happen in Seattle some day? Some city council members hope so.

Usually, city budgeting is a pretty uninspiring process—which is weird, when you think about it, because it's all about how your money is spent on stuff we all use every single day. (And extra weird when you think about how much people love to complain about their money is being spent after the fact.) Here's how it happens in Seattle: Using the previous year's budget as a starting place, the mayor and his staff make a plan for how to spend millions of dollars, and then the city council fights over how to change a tiny fraction of that, and then everyone pats themselves on the back. Nonprofits lobby lawmakers to fund certain things in the budget, and sometimes citizens even write angry e-mails. But most of the time it's too late in the process, or there's just not enough extra cash to do much of what they want.

Now consider something called “participatory budgeting.” Basically, it works like this: Cities set aside a part of their budget to be allocated by a public vote. Volunteers organize meetings where citizens brainstorm ideas for projects or programs they want to see in their neighborhoods, and then they help turn those ideas into formal proposals, which are vetted by city departments. Then citizens vote on which project they want to fund.

Participatory budgeting is meant to include whole new groups of people in the work of spending the city’s money. And it seems to be working. In Porto Allegre, changes in leadership have recently stalled some projects, but overall the new way of budgeting has increased sanitation, bus service and the number of students in schools. In Boston and New York, more low-income residents and people of color got involved in voting for projects than in traditional elections, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project, which helps cities start the process and presented this week at a forum and city council committee meeting in Seattle.

"It brings people to the table who don’t usually have a seat at the table when budgets are being made,” says Ginny Browne, who works with cities on the west coast for the Participatory Budgeting Project. Often, voting on a participatory budget involves people who don’t have legal immigration status or are under 18—in other words, people who don’t usually get to vote at all—and is held in unconventional places, like transit centers or online. (It’s up to cities to figure out logistics, like how to verify that people aren’t voting more than once.)

And when it comes to participatory budgeting, the citizen involvement only increases over time, according to this report from the World Bank. "Citizens realize that there is a direct connection between the time they dedicate to participatory budgeting and changes in policy outcomes," the reports states.

The whole thing is reminiscent of Council Member Kshama Sawant’s “people’s budget." That effort sought to replace current budgeting’s focus on big public safety budgets with taxes on “big business and the super-wealthy” (and spending focused on social services and “the needs of the majority”). They're separate efforts, but they both have support from Council Member Nick Licata, who wants to bring participatory budgeting to Seattle as soon as next year.

“We see other cities doing this and they are legitimate—they’re not all Berkley, Californias,” he says.

But there are a whole bunch of tricky questions to wade into before this could actually happen.

How much money do we spend this way? And where does it come from?

I’m stating the obvious here, right? But this particular question is huge. Probably the single toughest part of starting to use participatory budgeting is finding the money to budget in the first place. Do you take money from some program or project that’s currently being funded? Or do you raise new money through a new tax? Someone’s going to get pissed either way.

Still, other cities have figured it out (1,500 of them, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project). In Boston and New York, the money comes out of the cities’ annual budgets. In Vallejo, California, a portion of sales tax revenue—about $3.2 million—is set aside to be spent through participatory budgeting.

Licata says it’s still to early in the process to know what Seattle might do.

What kinds of things should be paid for this way?

Do we fund programs through participatory budgeting, or do we fund stuff? The trouble with funding programs or social services this way is that they usually need money every year to keep providing whatever service they offer. Building stuff, on the other hand, has some ongoing maintenance costs but mostly needs one big chunk of money one time.

Boston and New York’s programs both spend money only on capital projects, but in Vallejo it’s much broader. Spending there in the last two years has covered “community gardens, street lighting and road repairs, park improvements, youth and senior programs, and a cost-saving spay and neuter program,” according to the Participatory Budgeting Project.

How would we organize?

The process of picking projects and voting could happen citywide—everyone pitches projects to happen across the city, and then everyone votes for one—or be divided by neighborhood, or the newly created city council districts. The effort could also be targeted at one specific group or type of project. In Boston, the whole thing is focused on youth and young people ages 12 to 25 vote on how to spend $1 million of the city’s capital budget each year.

Licata says he’s interested in that as a starting place, possibly as a pilot project for next year’s budget. He’s also looking at the idea of giving each city council district the budget for one full time employee and letting the people of the district decide what kind of work that person should be doing. It could be spent on a new police officer or someone to work with schools and parks, or on pedestrian safety in the area.

“If that worked well, then maybe opening it to one and a half or two people, then we begin to actually influence the budget," he says. “Ultimately citywide is where we want it to go if we’re going to impact [large city] departments."

A few other city council members were at the forum this week and Council President Tim Burgess said Wednesday he "love[s] the idea." A spokesperson for Mayor Ed Murray says his budget director attended this week's meetings on participatory budgeting, but wouldn't answer whether the mayor is supportive or how much he thinks Seattle could spend this way.