Governet Core

Version 0.2

Governet provides an interface to FEC election data. Governet acts as a facade over the FEC bulk data, allowing for local maniuplation and management of the data. This repository contains the core governet services, including the database, api, batch processor, and soon the UI and cache.

Getting Started with Development

Dependencies:

Install Docker & Docker Compose. Docker Community Edition for Mac and Windows comes pre-packaged with Docker Compose.

Setup:

1. Copy the file .env.example, renaming it to .env.

   The application relies on environment variables to understand how to connect to the database. Docker Compose looks for those environment variables stored in a .env file in the root of the project. As this file can contain sensitive information it's gitignored. However, we've included a working example. Simply rename the .env.example file in the root to .env and docker compose will pick it up

2. Run docker-compose up in the root directory of the project

   This will stand up the database, the loader, fetch the data from the FEC and load it into the DB, and stand up the API, connecting it to the database.

3. check out the data

   127.0.0.1:5000

   127.0.0.1:3000/api/candidates

The Governet Services

Frontend

React frontend for the system

Database

Postgres database

Exposes port 5324

Base database is governet.

API

Node.js + Express API

Exposes port 3000

See the file /backend/routes.js in this directory for the available routes

Loader

Python batch processer

Exposes port 5000, for a simple config/health check

At startup reads the configuration file from the loader directory, and fetchs + loads the requested years and data sets from the FEC bulk data server.

Author

Dan Budris

TO DO and FEATURES

Feature: jaccard index for candidate similarity based on contributions Feature: jaccard index for committes with similarity based on candidates they've contributed to Feature: contribution co-occurence heat-map Feature: contribution map for candidate -- use coloration or node size to indicate the co-occurance of individual donors Feature: candidate map for contributions -- use coloration or node size to indidicate the co-occurance of candidates a donor or PAC has contirbutied to in a given area Feature: candidate contribution timeline