IDleg

Being a spinoff of the #idleg Twitter hashtag, pronounced by some as Idle-G.

Interactive Portal to Idaho Legislature - BETA RELEASE

In development, i.e. use at your own risk

This project is part of a master's degree in "Data Journalism" at Boise State University. I'm building an alternative legislative portal for the state of Idaho that:

• Uses data from the Sunlight Foundation [Open States Project API] (https://sunlightlabs.github.io/openstates-api/) to provide a rich dataset of state legislative data

• Provides social tools for bills and other legislative actions, allowing constituents to "testify" on bills online

• Provides some basic statistics on legislative actions

• Provides a means to parse votes in various ways - by bill, lawmaker, party, etc.

• Demonstrates the type of information that hacker-journalists can access

• Demonstrates the cross-over between "open government" and "open news" initiatives

• In this idleg_flask repo, I'm refactoring and building out the project with Python Flask

You can read more about my [MA project on my blog] (http://www.paleomedia.org/2013/09/30/data-journalism/) and look for beta releases and other updates at idleg.info soon.

Setup for Developers

Requirements

• Python 2.6 or higher
• A Sunlight Labs API Key - Read their instructions to install the key and use the Python library
• Recommend installing in virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper

    $ pip install virtualenv
    $ virtualenv idleg_flask
    $ cd idleg_flask
    $ source bin/activate
    $ pip install flask

• Then fork the repository if you want or just clone it to your virtualenv:

    $ git clone https://github.com/paleomedia/idleg_flask.git

• Finally, install dependencies (note: requirements.txt contains some bloat... will clean up dependencies at a later date)

    $ pip install -r requirements.txt

I think that will work... but please let us know if you run into problems getting it running. And remember, the app is still in development...

How to run

    python run.py

or

    ./run.py

Contributors

@paleomedia

##Technical Advisors @nilabmm @jwoodsy1