jgilliam / hellocongress Goto Github PK

Hello Congress tells members of Congress what their constituent's priorities are, and encourages staffers to request research from their constituents.

This is built with Ruby on Rails and uses the White House 2 API (http://whitehouse2.org/) for the priorities, and the Sunlight Labs API for legislator information. 

It's live here:  http://hellocongress.org/

To install:

git clone git://github.com/jgilliam/hellocongress.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

You will need to copy database.yml.dist to database.yml and set your database settings like you would any Rails app.  Also copy hc.yml.dist to hc.yml and add in your own Google Analytics code, etc.

This will create the database, run the migrations, and set up the initial data:

rake db:create db:migrate
rake sunlight:legislators wh2:legislators wh2:issues

Then you need to run these two rake tasks once day to keep the priorities for each legislator up to date, and track how it's changing over time.

rake wh2:priorities rank:priorities

That should be it, feel free to contact me if you have any problems.   Mostly the code is useful as an example for how you could use the White House 2 API with ActiveResource.   It uses dweinand's version of will_paginate to handle pagination with ActiveResource.  When you run the git submodule commands, it will load up that for you as well.