Very cool! It sounds like they are doing something very similar to what Neighbor.ly is planning to do. You can read a good overview here... A New Way to Invest in Communities.
It's interesting that Neighbor.ly started off as a "traditional" civic crowdfunding website. Evidently they think there's more money to be made by making it easier for everybody to purchase municipal bonds. It makes sense because it's an investment rather than a donation.
Speaking of donations... I'm convinced that it would be super excellent if every government organization (GO) had a really visible donate button on their website. If you're interested... here's what I wrote about the topic of donating to GOs... razotarianism.
Not sure if you saw it already but here's my favorite budget argument... Is Pragmatarianism (Tax Choice) Less Wrong?.
Recently I talked with a guy from Grant Street Group. They make, among other things, software with which local governments can auction their bonds on the Internet.
By making the auction process more transparent and easier to participate in, they enable local governments which need to sell bonds (to build a high school, for instance), to sell those bonds at, say, 7% interest instead of 8%. (At least, that's what he said.)
They have similar software for auctioning liens on property taxes, which also helps local governments raise more money by bringing more buyers to each auction, and probably helps the buyers reduce their risks by giving them more information.
This is a big deal. I think it's potentially more important than any budget argument that's been on the front pages since the 1960s. Yet I only heard of it by chance.
People would rather argue about reducing the budget by eliminating waste, or cutting subsidies to people who don't deserve it, or changing our ideological priorities. Nobody wants to talk about auction mechanics. But fixing the auction mechanics is the easy win. It's so easy that nobody's interested in it. It doesn't buy us fuzzies or let us signal our affiliations. To an individual activist, it's hardly worth doing.