rubyforgood / demand-progress Goto Github PK

License: MIT License

Ruby 48.33% JavaScript 44.60% CSS 1.38% HTML 5.69%

demand-progress's Introduction

demand-progress

A functioning democracy requires an engaged citizenry.

Our stakeholder, Demand Progress is focused on Internet Freedom, Open Government, and Financial Reform. It works on a bipartisan basis to make information about Congress available to the public through the Congressional Data Coalition. In order for civil society to hold government accountable they must keep track of shifting legislative schedules and content.

It is difficult to follow when Congress has scheduled a committee/subcommittee hearing/meeting without a paid subscription to a news service that gathers this info.

The Senate and House release meeting notices online in structured data formats, but there’s no well-designed publicly-available central place to see all the notices from the different committees or subcommittees. (The closest attempt is run by GovTrack, and it is good but is missing key features).

The Demand Progress team will build a user-friendly web based weekly agenda (calendar) for congressional hearings and markups. Users will be able to view the week with Monday at the top of the page, with items organized chronologically in a list, broken out by day of the week and hour. Each item will contain sufficient information about the proceeding, including who is holding it (committee and or subcommittee), the subject matter, a link to the committee website, the date and time, and where it can be watched online. With one click, users will be able to add these events to their own calendar, either singly or a set of items at a time. In addition, users will be able to visually identify changed calendar items updated in the last 24 hour. If time allows we will have a couple other stretch goals requested by our stakeholder including a tool for converting PDF's of pre-introduction legislation to plain text and/or a tool for parsing organizational sign-on lists for letters of support.

Team Leads: David Bock and Joel Cahalan

Local setup

Repo pulldown and clicky setup

Fork the repo in Github
Clone it to your local machine
Request a ProPublica API key: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/propublica-congress-api

Install dependencies

Install ruby 2.3.1: $ rbenv install 2.3.1 or $ rvm install 2.3.1
Install bundler gem: $ gem install bundler
Install ruby dependencies: $ bundle install
Install javascript dependencies: $ yarn install

Rig up your environment

Create your database user in postgres: $ createuser -s -r demand-progress
Create your database and tables: $ rails db:setup
Set your propublica API key: $ export PROPUBLICA_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY_VALUE
Load the committees data: $ rake committees:senate:load && rake committees:house:load

Fire it up!

Start the server: rails server

demand-progress's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

Forkers

danielschuman crawfoal afrodevgirl chompasina bokmann chengjingfeng hiteshmah-jan

demand-progress's Issues

create a transformation layer in ruby to transform database data into UI consumable data

The first (and maybe only, tbd) example is:

The database is storing the events like this:

events = [
  {
    id: 4,
    topic: "this is a topic",
    occurs_at: "2018-06-09T10:45:00Z"
  },
  {
    id: 5,
    topic: "this is a topic2",
    occurs_at: "2018-06-09T11:45:00Z"
  }
]

The UI would like to receive the events like this:

events = [
  {
    agenda_date: "2018-06-09",
    events: [
      {
        id: 1,
        topic: "this is a topic",
        occurs_at: "2018-06-09T10:45:00Z"
      },
      {
        id: 2,
        topic: "this is another topic",
        occurs_at: "2018-06-09T11:45:00Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    agenda_date: "2018-06-10",
    events: [
      {
        id: 3,
        topic: "this is a topic on the 10th",
        occurs_at: "2018-06-10T10:45:00Z"
      },
      {
        id: 4,
        topic: "this is another topic on the 10th",
        occurs_at: "2018-06-10T11:45:00Z"
      }
    ]
  }
]

EventsController#index needs to order events by occurs_at

Set up a rake task to pull xml data from Senate website and add it to events model

Configure Travis CI to pass build

Currently build is failing. My sense is that this is a config issue.

Add google calendar api integration

Use the api to setup a public calendar that publishes events gathered to the rails app

Add agenda view with events

Investigate using propublica api to access congressional hearing data

see here for more details:

Here is a command that can be used:

curl "https://api.propublica.org/congress/v1/115/committees/hearings.json"
  -H "X-API-Key: PROPUBLICA_API_KEY"```