Com'ON Cluj-Napoca — Romania's First City-Scale Online Youth Participatory Budget

Com'ON grew out of Cluj-Napoca's 2015 European Youth Capital year. The 2015 pilot (28 Feb–5 Dec 2015) was, per Participedia, the first online participatory budget at city scale in Romania. It cost €73,571, of which €65,096 came from EEA Grants and about €8,475 from the city (council documents cite a slightly different total of €82,947, so the figure is approximate).
Young people aged 16–35 submitted 437 initiatives; 117 were funded (about 27%) and 25 more found outside funding through crowdsourcing or donations. 18,872 participants cast 48,609 votes against a target audience of 15,000.
URBACT describes later rounds as exceeding 1,000 small initiatives, over 50,000 community voters and more than €550,000 of municipal investment, with the programme institutionalised in 2022. It was replicated in Sfântu Gheorghe (2019) and Satu Mare (2023) and informed the Com'ON Europe white paper (Erasmus+, six cities).
Caveats: figures come from programme reports and not an independent impact evaluation; Romanian budgets generally struggle with project delivery times, per the Romanian Centre for European Policies (CRPE), and the city's general participatory budget saw only modest turnout (the most-voted 2022 project received 675 votes).

Read the full analysis: https://eeagrants.org/en/fmo/areas-work/programmes-and-projects-information/archive/2009-2014/projects/ro09-0097