Komitee Equal Shares: Choosing Together as Voters and as Groups with a Co-designed Virtual Budget Algorithm

TL;DR

Komitee Equal Shares extends the Method of Equal Shares by treating participants as both voters and evaluators within a co designed framework that uses weighted impact fields and priceable allocations to produce a single, proportional funding outcome. The approach yields voting receipts that render funding decisions legible and auditable, balancing individual preferences with collectively defined values in a unified allocation. Field deployment in Kultur Komitee Winterthur with 38 participants and 121 proposals funded 43 projects under a 50 50 split between individual and impact field budgets, demonstrating increased diversity of funded projects and alignment with community values. The study highlights design implications for dual role participation, deliberation structure, preparation, and open review while acknowledging limitations and proposing avenues for generalization and future work.

Abstract

Public funding processes demand fairness, learning, and outcomes that participants can understand. We introduce Komitee Equal Shares, a priceable virtual-budget allocation framework that integrates two signals: in voter mode, participants cast point votes; in evaluator mode, small groups assess proposals against collectively defined impact fields. The framework extends the Method of Equal Shares by translating both signals into virtual spending power and producing voting receipts. We deployed the framework in the 2025 Kultur Komitee in Winterthur, Switzerland. Our contributions are: (1) a clear separation of decision modes, addressing a gap in social choice that typically treats participatory budgeting as preference aggregation while citizens also see themselves as evaluators; and (2) the design of voting receipts that operationalise priceability into participant-facing explanations, making proportional allocations legible and traceable. The framework generalises to participatory grant-making and budgeting, offering a model where citizens act as voters and evaluators within one proportional, explainable allocation.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Komitee Equal Shares process multiple real-world signals from individual voting and group deliberation into an aggregation algorithm that gives citizens a fair and explainable outcome.
• Figure 2: The Komitee Equal Shares framework as a five-stage process.
• Figure 3: Screenshot of the voting receipts from the Komitee Equal Shares tool in Winterthur 2025. The receipts show how different groups and individual voters allocated their budgets across projects. This breakdown makes the algorithm’s decisions transparent by displaying both the votes and the actual spending for each group.
• Figure 4: The screenshot of the official call for cultural projects in Winterthur in November 2024. The public document includes the eight jointly defined fields of activity of the 2025 Kultur Komitee in Winterthur, which guided the funding priorities and were later translated into weighted value categories.
• Figure 5: Participants first distribute 15 points across fields of cultural impact, fine-tuning the relative importance of each criterion within the Komitee Equal Shares algorithm. They then set the balance between these collectively defined field weights and their own individual assessments, deciding how much each mode of evaluation contributes to the final outcome.