Data 4 Democracy

About

Data4Democracy provides local data about UK constituencies and electoral wards. This includes election results and demographic data.

This project is still in the early phases, but the intention is that Data4Democracy will provide an API to get data, as well as a UI to browse data.

Installation

Local Install

Pre-requisites

• Install Ruby (currently 3.1.2) - Ruby Version Manager is recommended
• Install Bundler (gem install bundler)
• Install postgres with the postGIS extension:
  • sudo apt-get install postgresql-12 postgresql-client-12
  • sudo apt-get install postgis postgresql-12-postgis-3
• Create a superuser postgres account for yourself:
  • sudo su - postgres
  • psql
  • CREATE USER <YOUR TERMINAL USERNAME> WITH CREATEDB CREATEUSER;

Install the Rails application

• Clone the repo (git clone [email protected]:asibs/data4democracy.git)
• Switch into the app directory (cd data4democracy)
• Install the dependencies (bundle install)
• Setup the database & schema (rails db:create & rails db:migrate)
• Add initial seed data (rails db:seed)

Load data into the app

The election data is loaded from Democracy Club and area / boundary data is loaded from FindThatPostcode.

Run the rails console: rails c

# Load Westminster Parliamentary elections
DemocracyClub::DcDataGetter.call(election_type_slug: 'parl')

# Load Local Council elections
DemocracyClub::DcDataGetter.call(election_type_slug: 'local')

This will take a long time if you run it for all elections, as it will load election results and area boundary geographic data.

You can limit it to certain dates by also passing the election_date_before & election_date_after parameters.

Run the app

Run the server: rails s

You can then access a proof-of-concept UI from: http://localhost:3000/areas/

Click on an area from the list to see a map with that constituency highlighted in red.

Heroku Install

TODO

This README would normally document whatever steps are necessary to get the application up and running.

Things you may want to cover:

• Ruby version

• System dependencies

• Configuration

• Database creation

• Database initialization

• How to run the test suite

• Services (job queues, cache servers, search engines, etc.)

• Deployment instructions

• ...