Metadata for Democracy

The purpose of this project is to provide real-time status information about Data For Democracy's projects and allow volunteers to more easily find out what work they can contribute today.

The initial version will track github activity for each project and provide an API endpoint for retrieving that information.

Project Lead: @yesthatjake

Project Strucutre

The initial work for this project will be in 4 parts:

• A datastore for keeping information about the projects.
• A script for retrieving and storing a snapshot for the project data.
• A web hook that listens for github changes and updates the dataset.
• An API endpoint for querying the dataset.

Technologies

Which technologies are used will be a function of what skills our volunteers bring to the table. The initial plan is to use python and postgreSQL.

Running the Project

Metadata for Democracy uses docker to run in development. If you don't have docker installed, you can read the installation instructions here.

Once you have docker installed and running, navigate to the root project directory and execute

docker-compose up

This will start the database, web hook, and API server.

Accessing services running in containers

In order to avoid conflict with other databases running in development, PostgreSQL is exposed on port 5550 on the host machine. The webhook and API are running on ports 8079 and 8080 respectively.

To run the snapshot script, navigate to the snapshot subdirectory and execute

./take.py

Coding standards

Eventually, MD4D will be enforcing something close to the PEP-8 standard for code consistency and using pylint in our toolchain, our current goal is to remain as close to "normal-looking" python as we can. For now, anyone reviewing a pull request should check for the following:

• Variable and parameter names are snake_case, not camelCase.
• Indentation is two spaces, not tabs.
• All source files end with a single carriage return.

These standards will evolve as the project matures.

Guiding principles

In addition to the goals of Data For Democracy, this project seeks to adhere to the following principles:

• Write for reuse - While this tool is being built first for Data For Democracy, it should be written with an eye towards being available to any organization that uses some or all of the tools we use to organize our own work.

• No vendor lock-in - Write to run on any platform with thin, modular adapters for specific platforms.