I learned recently about the formal concept and phrase “Participatory Budgeting”
Some links:
Crowdmatching seems related, so I was thinking about how much and in what way to talk about the value of crowdmatching in relation to PB. Thoughts from others?
I LOVE participatory budgeting! 
It’s very much aligned with sociocracy, and it similarly ensures everyone has a voice in how things are going.
Check out Cobudgeting for member engagement: an interview with the Evolutionary Leadership Institute | by Francesca Pick | Greaterthan | Medium for a nice quick read on the topic, as well as: https://cobudget.co which is a tool for making it easy to do. Built by a coop in the Enspiral network, so bonus points there.
Okay, this actually ties in here. I just finally took time to make sense of “Democratic Funding” at https://fundoss.org/ which I noted at Snowdrift Wiki - Other Crowdfunding / Fundraising Services
They do participatory budgeting of a sort. They have a pool of funds, and it’s distributed with an effectively inverse relationship to the size of the donations. Large grants have less say in directing the pool, small donors have more say. The pool is split among a set of accepted projects. It’s all a one-off sort of fund-drive approach at this time (unclear about the future).
I do think our crowdmatching approach is also participatory-budgeting in a sense. We don’t automatically spend all of the potential budget from all patrons, but we do see more of it go to projects as more patrons join that project’s crowd.
On a side-note: I had an initial misunderstanding of their approach which actually would be possible for crowdmatching as we plan it. Our old, too-complex original multiple-shares formula actually had their sort of quadratic (logarithmic) matching aspect in that pledges of higher value got reduced matching. This had the same principle that a large donor could put in a huge pledge and they would be matching many times over the small donors. Our formula failed in terms of explaining to patrons what a “share” meant since they couldn’t anticipate how it would work out in the end. We could potentially improve that by using something like their math which uses the relative pledge sizes in dollars, but to fit that with the actual idea of matching and not necessarily donating your full budget, that would be a different challenge to work out, and it seems too complex. Just interesting to note these relationships.