Skip to content
/ gvrn Public
forked from dakotalillie/gvrn

GVRN connects constituents with their congresspeople and let's them make their voice heard quickly, easily, and for free.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

MatteBru/gvrn

 
 

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

GVRN

Despite its somewhat satirical startup-y name, GVRN is designed to address the very serious issue of high barriers to communnication between constituents and their representatives. It gives users a brief non-partisan overview of their reps and senators, including social media accounts and wikipedia entries. Once you've decided to make your voice heard GVRN allows users to schedule calls with their rep's office without paying a dime.

GVRN is designed as with a fairly traditional rails app structure:

  • The views are built on ERB files with Semantic UI as a CSS framework, SCSS, minimal JQuery for animations
  • It uses a PostgreSQL database
  • Congressional seed data is pulled from Propublica's Congress API, Google's Knowledge Graph API, and Wikimedia's API/Wikipedia
  • Users' congressional district data is pulled from the Google Civics API
  • Calling functionality and reminder texts to users use Twilio asynchronously through delayed_job
  • District maps were created as a customized GIS map through Esri's ArcGis

Usage

To set up GVRN you will first need to clone it to your machine:

git clone [email protected]:MatteBru/gvrn.git

Install its gems:

bundle-install

To create and seed the database, you must have PostgreSQL installed, then run:

rake db:setup

Note: Seeding will take quite some time, also some members of congress have changed since the exception handling in the seed file was created, so there may be some weirdness with the data pulled from Wikipedia

Once that is done, you should be able to run the development server by running:

rails s

It should open on port 3000, so if you visit http://localhost:3000/ you should see the landing page

There are two simultaneous processes that must be run in order to get the app functioning correctly, the web process we just set up and a worker process to handle the scheduling, calling and texting. To start this process, you can run:

rake jobs:work

Note: Twilio requires an externally facing page for calling, this is currently set to GVRN's homepage, if you want calling to work on your version you will need to modivy the Twilio base URL in the Twilier model

About

GVRN connects constituents with their congresspeople and let's them make their voice heard quickly, easily, and for free.

Topics

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • JavaScript 77.0%
  • Ruby 12.1%
  • HTML 8.5%
  • CSS 2.2%
  • CoffeeScript 0.2%