/CampaignFinancePHL

Making Philadelphia's campaign finance data easier to understand.

Primary LanguageJavaScript

#Campaign Finance PHL#

A project to improve access to/report on/organize Philadelphia's public campaign finance data.

Based on Open Disclosure Oakland, but currently not using any code directly.

Grabbing Philly campaign finance data from the city's ftp store ftp://ftp.phila-records.com/. Also check out the Board of Ethics page and the Reports page.

##Setup for Development##

  1. Clone the project
  2. Get a recent version of Ruby working on your machine
  3. Download and install Node.js
  4. Change to the project directory and run npm install to get dependencies
  5. Install gulp globally with npm install -g gulp (run as sudo npm install -g gulp if needed)
  6. Install Postgres locally and start your server
  7. Execute gulp load-data from within the project directory

Your Postgres server should now have a campaign_finance_phl database full of campaign finance data.

###Project Status/TODO:###

  • Parse raw data and get it into a database
    • Get a sample contrib.txt file into a DB
    • Do it for other types (expenses, receipts) and committees
  • Create a REST api to access the data. Something like:
    • Convert data-access layer from MongoDB to Postgres
    • /candidates
    • /committees
    • /contributions
  • Create a frontend to report on data, including
    • Totals by candidate (see Oakland's)
    • Mapping
    • Spending by unaffiliated committees (need to figure this out)
  • Create an admin frontend to manage candidates and other manual entities

###Details###

  • Candidate-self-funded contributions are identified with a separate data-update. Need to run this after every dislosure deadline.