MeinBundestag is an application about the German parliament. It provides information about the deputies of the current election period and allows the user to read the speeches held in the parliament.
The goal of this application is to make these kind of information easily accessible by providing a mobile application and therefore increase the political interest of its users.
The application is still under development, so there is no installable version of it in one of the app stores. If you're already interested, you can run the application yourself following the instructions described here.
The application basically uses two open data sources provided by:
The data provided by abgeordnetenwatch contains personal information about each deputy of the German parliament as well as information about their votings and subsidiary activities. The API is based on a database using the ODbL 1.0 license is fairly straightforward to use.
The protocols of the German parliament are published as .xml files without any specific license (public domain) on its website. There is also a DTD for the protocols of the current election period for easier automated usage.
The application is split into the backend providing the actual data and the frontend running on a mobile device. Here is a general overview which technology is used in particular:
- Backend (Python): Docker, Docker-Compose
- Frontend (Javascript/Node): React Native, Expo
The backend itself consists of three services:
-
MongoDB database
The database persists the processed protocols and is connected to the backend network. The source code contains a module database that implements the communication with the database.
-
Flask webserver
The python backend provides a simple REST API using Flask for the frontend to interact with. Furthermore, it is running a web-scraper that is constantly looking for new protocols based on the selenium package. The speeches are analyzed with the textblob package that is used for the sentiment analysis. This feature is rather experimental and does not produce fully reliable results yet. Of course, it is interacting with the database and the ODS via the backend network. Currently, the Flask application enables CORS headers for an easier development using the expo client. Due to security issues, disable this feature when running the backend in production.
-
ODS
The ODS is experimentally used for providing the list of all deputies of the parliament. The pipeline is configured once manually and afterwards set in an environment file. Without specifying the pipeline in this file, the Python backend uses a fallback implementation to fetch the data directly from abgeordnetenwatch.
The frontend is a minimalistic React Native application that only uses native elements. Expo is used for an easier development phase using the webview. The frontend has only been tested using the Expo app for android on a native device without building an apk and installing it.
You have to install the following list of software before running the application:
There is a Makefile in the src/ directory that provides a target for building the backend. It also provides targets for the frontend, but these targets require additional software to be installed, so it may be easier to run the expo client directly.
You must provide a valid .env file in the src/ folder that sets the following environment variables:
### DATABASE ###
DB_HOST=database
DB_PORT=27017
CLEAR_DB=no
DB_USER={your-user}
DB_PASSWORD={your-password}
### BACKEND ###
# CONFIG:: API
API_PORT=3000
API_HOST=0.0.0.0
API_AUTHOR={your-name}
API_VERSION={your-version}
API_CONTACT={your-mail}
# CONFIG:: SCRAPER
SCRAPER_TIMEOUT=5
SCRAPER_INTERVAL=86400
# CONFIG:: PROTOCOL
PROTOCOL_DTD_FILE=/usr/data/protocol.dtd
PROTOCOL_DIRECTORY=/protocols
# CONFIG:: ODS (leave blank so fallbacks are used)
ODS_HOST={}
ODS_PIPELINE_DEPUTIES={}
ODS_FALLBACK_DEPUTIES=https://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/api/parliament/bundestag/deputies.json
ODS_PROFILE_URL={}Of course, you can change these values according to your settings. You'll probably have to create a user/password in the database container when specifying it here. The general procedure in order to run the application on your local machine then looks like this:
# clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/fischerbenjamin/meinbundestag.git
# run the backend (replace 'make backend' with 'make backend-ods' for using the ODS)
(cd meinbundestag/src && make backend)
# run the frontend
(cd meinbundestag/src/mobile/meinbundestag-mobile && yarn install && yarn web)Running the application on the expo client on your device requires you to configure the IP address of the host providing the backend in the file src/mobile/meinbundestag-mobile/config.js.
The screenshots were taken on a mobile device running the expo client:
The source code for both the frontend and backend is documented and linted. The Python code is checked by pylint, pydocstyle and pylama whereas the frontend code is linted by eslint. Further documentation can be generated by tools such as pydoc or jsdoc. The latter is already included in the dev dependencies of the React Native project.
You can simply contact me by writing me an e-mail. Feel free to share your interest, criticism or anything else. I'm looking forward to your message :)