EP. 27: Luke Hohmann - FirstRoot - Participatory Budgeting in Schools

Stories Connecting Dots with Markus Andrezak

"Calm down, take a deep breath and just talk to me“

Luke Hohmann’s new mission: Participatory Budgeting in Schools

Luke Hohmann founded FirstRoot to advance participatory budgeting in schools. Let me get straight to the point: You can invest in this company in this early stage. You can also support the cause by talking about or by simply using the free software and talking about it in your kids’ school.

Luke Hohmann and me go back a long time. I met him ca. 12 years ago in one of his trainings and was fortunate enough to co-train and facilitate with him. He wrote an early book „Beyond Software Architecture“ which to me is one of the best books on software Architecture (sic!) and was ahead of its time. He then got deep into Serious Games with his Innovation Games trainings and a great book on it. Also ahead of its time.

From there he was on a constant path towards which had to end in what he does now. Through his Innovation Games, he made it to participatory budgeting in communities, in the Enterprise and other important places. Also, he built an enterprise SaaS company to further bring his ideas deeper into Companies and also enable distributed Serious Games. Now, he founded FirstRoot, bringing participatory budgeting to schools.

(You will realize over the course of the pod, that we couldn’t constrain ourselves - we wouldn’t be Luke and Markus, then - from drawing all kinds of parallels to Quality of Software, agile, Portfolio Planning, Architecture, Comics for Story Mapping and what have you.)

The underlying problem that Luke is tackling with FirstRoot is inequality of chances by social background, financial illiteracy (lack of education on that topic in school in general) and economic disparity.

First Root is having its part in solving that problem by offering a five step process in facilitating Participatory Budgeting to pupils around the globe, based on a software solution.

Steps are:

1. Planning
2. Gather Ideas
3. Refine Ideas to proposals
4. Voting (there will always be more ideas than we can afford - „a truism in life“
5. Projects in implematation

In the pod Luke thoroughly leads us through an example to show us how it works and which impact it has.

I put the core of the idea at the beginning of the cast.

Again: If you believe in this story, you can also invest for as little as a couple of hundred dollars alongside of people like Alex Osterwalder, Lysa Adkins and many more. You also help by just using the software and bring it into schools. Just follow the „Invest“ link on firstroot.co