Contract Countdown

A working prototype of a service that allows council officers, journalists, and local climate groups to find and monitor climate-related local authority tenders, in the UK. It uses Contracts Finder ODCS data, via mysociety/procurement_data.

The original static prototype was built as part of mySociety’s April 2022 prototyping week for reducing local authority emissions through procurement.

Development install

You will need Docker installed.

Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:mysociety/contract-countdown.git
cd contract-countdown

Add a MAPIT_URL and MAPIT_API_KEY to a file at .env. You can get a free MapIt API key here. A sample .env file is provided in `env.sample'.

Start the Docker environment:

docker-compose up

(If Python complains about missing libraries, chances are the Python requirements have changed since your Docker image was last built. You can rebuild it with, eg: docker-compose build web.)

To load contracts data, get a bash shell inside the web container:

docker-compose exec web bash

Due to a bug, you currently need to create an empty directory at data/procurement_data. Inside the shell, run:

cd data
mkdir procurement_data
cd ../

The first time round you should run:

./manage.py import_councils

which will make sure there's a complete list of UK councils in the app.

Then, still inside the shell, run:

./manage.py import_tenders

The import will take a while!

Finally, to import the climate councillors and officers, run:

./manage.py import_climate_representatives

For this to work, ensure you have comeval_councillors.csv and comeval_officers.csv in data/procurement_data. These can be downloaded from here.