Participation of Non-Resident Students in the Creation of Participatory Budget in Wroclaw

This paper was mainly intended to enable a preliminary assessment of the factors qualifying the out-of-town full-time students, temporarily staying in Wrocław, for the participation in creating the participatory budget of Wrocław. We can observe that only small group of students voted for participatory budget of Wrocław. Main reason of non-voting was a lack of information about participatory budget and possibility of voting. Some of respondents were also misinformed about possibility of voting. It seems also that that main reason of non-voting is really lack of interest. In introducing participatory budget one of main players is local community. Applicants, non-governmental organizations, district councils, schools or other institutions are able to motivate citizens for voting. In our survey we discovered that these actors didn’t play a single minute. Surveyed voting-students had heard about participatory budget from friends, family members, or they had found information from social media, town internet page and posters. The main factors influencing the choice of the projects by surveyed students were in general: descriptions of tasks in the electronic voting system, tasks descriptions available on the town website, information spread by the applicants (online, by leaflets, posters, banners and other ones) and opinions of family members. Summarizing we can notice that main problem is lack of information provided by different town and non-governmental bodies and what results poor acquisition of voters.