micahstubbs / electiondesk

A social media monitoring dashboard for election officials

ElectionDesk

ElectionDesk is a Social Media Dashboard designed to help voting officials monitor social media activity.

ElectionDesk has several built-in tools to facilitate this:

• A trending topics view that gathers filtered social media updates across several social networks
• Filtering by topics and location
• In-dashboard bookmark and reply functionality
• Conversations view to keep track of existing messages that have been sent and received
• And more

Technical description

ElectionDesk is splitted into two parts -- the web-facing dashboard and the social media consumer running in the background.

Dashboard

The ElectionDesk dashboard is based off of the CodeIgniter PHP Framework it shares data with the consumer using a MySQL database for general data and MongoDB for social media interactions.

Consumer

The consumer is a Composer-backed CLI app that is responsible for fetching social media interactions from the various social networks and storing them in MongoDB. The initial version used DataSift but it has since been transitioned to support interaction directly with the various API's from the social media networks.

The DataSift functionality has hover been retained, allowing switching between DataSift and Social Media API's via a config file constant.

Requirements

ElectionDesk requires the following software to be installed and configured first

• PHP 5.4+
  • Composer
• MySQL
• MongoDB
• Memcached

Installation

Clone the latest version of ElectionDesk

$ git clone [email protected]:votinginfoproject/ElectionDesk.git
$ cd ElectionDesk

Create the config file

$ cp config.sample.php config.php
$ vim config.php

Import MySQL database structure

$ mysql -u YOUR_MYSQL_USERNAME -p YOUR_MYSQL_DATABASE < database_structure.sql

Install composer depencies

$ cd consumer
$ composer install

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The next steps depends on whether you're using the Social Media APIs or DataSift as a data provider

If using individual social network APIs (recommended)

Set up a cron job to run the consumer periodically

$ crontab -e

Example cronjob that runs every 4 minutes

*/4 * * * * cd /var/www/electiondesk/consumer && php start.php > /var/log/consumer.log

If using DataSift

Run start.php in the consumer fodler

$ cd consumer
$ php start.php

It is recommended that you use a process monitoring service such as supervisord to restart the script in case of a failure.