For over 23 years, the City of Porto Alegre has been a global leader in its deployment of participatory budgeting, whereby citizens are able to designate the addition of services and works to the city's budget. Mayor Fortunati asked IBM to help drive and maintain momentum in Porto Alegre's ongoing journey to becoming a cognitive democracy, focusing on enhancing participative budgeting to both extend its reach into the broader population and better inform the decision-making process around investment in local projects.

For this project, IBM invited Citi to add its financial expertise to the Smarter Cities Challenge project; the team of six IBM and two Citi executives worked closely together to deliver a set of recommendations to the City of Porto Alegre.