"Participatory budgeting" allows ordinary people to decide how their municipal budget is spent. Many cities around the world employ this process. Chicago's 49th Ward was the first municipality in the U.S. to embrace this novel experiment in direct democracy: regular citizens gathered to research and develop proposals on how to spend the Ward's infra-structure money and then residents voted on each proposal. The outcome was truly "democracy in action" and has continued for several years now.