/budgetparty

Primary LanguageJavaScriptThe UnlicenseUnlicense

Budget Party

Table of Contents

Hello!

We're Team Budget Party! Our team includes developers, designers, a publisher, a curriculum writer and educators from Open Austin, the Austin Monitor, and Austin ISD.

We are interested in the health of our civic fabric and we are excited about the potential for youth inclusion in the decision making process of local government.

Thanks for coming here to learn more!

Project Description

Budget Party helps people understand and augment a city budget for austin.

Recently, Austin Budget Party has been awarded a Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund grant to help design and develop a Digital Mock City Council experience with austinbudget.party.

The goal of the grant is to create an online, open-source, digital budget debate platform and curriculum designed for middle and high school students to explore civic challenges and priorities.

Open Austin contributors partnered with the Capital of Texas Media Foundation, publisher of the Austin Monitor, to improve the budget app, develop a teaching curriculum, and implement the program in 10 pilots schools in Austin.

You can read more on our blog post announcing the grant and from the original project proposal.

Our Team

Roadmap

At this stage, we have:

  1. A (mostly) working web (version 1.0) austinbudget.party. This is our second iteration of a design and user workflow. The first prototype (version 0.1) was used at our first Game Night with Glasshouse Policy. This is the feedback we got from that event.
  2. Designs for version 1.0 of Budget Party. See examples here and here. Sketch File
  3. A curriculum to provide context for middle school and high school students for understanding how the City Council makes decisions. We are looking for opportunities to use the curriculum in classes with the Budget Party app.
  4. Our team participated in the ATX Hack for Change on June 2-4, 2017. These were our goals from the hackathon.

We are currently working on bug fixes and more features to be included in v1.1. We are also looking for feedback from users and testing with educators.

More ideas for what is ahead in more detail can be found as the are updated in this Google Doc.

Slack

Invite yourself to the Open Austin Slack Channel and join the #budgetparty channel.

Contributing

This project has received contributions from some wonderful volunteers. We would love to add your name to the list below. Over the course of this project, we have opportunities to help with design, development, QA & testing, writing, and more. To contribute, you can:

  • Report a bug or request a feature by opening a new issue.
  • Review open issues and leave a comment if you'd like to help or if you need more information.

For more information, check out CONTRIBUTING.md

Additional Contributors

Curriculum

An awesome teacher at Lanier High School, Laurie Beaman, laurie.beaman@austinisd.org, designed and wrote a Curriculum Binder for teaching high schoolers about the City Budget. Check it out here: Budget Game Binder PDF

We'd like to convert this PDF document into HTML to make it accessible for more educators to view and use. If you're interested in helping with this task, check out this issue and let's chat!

Design

Here is a link to our design assets and documentation. Here are open issues labeled "Design" where you can discuss, provide feedback or volunteer to help.

Development

The Budget Party app is primarily written in javascript and leans heavily into the libraries React and Redux. The static assets are hosted via Github pages. Data submitted to the server lives in a Firebase, a Google cloud service.

Getting started

This project has a dependency on Node and npm. Make sure they are install on your machine by running the following commands: node -v npm -v

This should return the version number of your install. If it doesn't Google how to install Node & npm for your operating system. Maybe these links could help you?

Once you have cloned this repo to you local machine, open the app directory in your Terminal.

cd app

Installation

  1. npm install

Development

  1. npm start
  2. visit http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Build

  1. npm run build

Deploy

  1. npm run deploy