Airesis - The Social Network for eDemocracy

The first open source web application for eDemocracy

Summary

This innovative tool for participatory democracy puts the citizens at the center, as the main actors, and finally allows them to be active in the decisions of their territory.

Users can view their own territory and listen to the voices and messages that come directly from other citizens or groups present.

The groups will be able to get in touch with the citizens, support the proposals and create events in the area.

Everything fully integrated with all major social networks and the ability to communicate through e-mail the proposals.

Users who wish to participate in the activities of groups can also sign up and follow the discussions on the forums.

But what really makes Airesis a platform for edemocracy? The first thing is a totally innovative mechanism for the construction of proposals, where finally the contributions and the minds of the users will be able to merge and make it possible to write proposals in a shared way.

Airesis allows users to have a better ranking on the basis of how they work and contribute to the proposals but at the same time allows a true comparison on the topics and content while maintaining the anonymity of users during the construction of the proposals.

Each time a user participates in a proposal will be overshadowed his real name, so as to ensure that the discussions will focus on the texts and the value of what is written rather than who wrote it.

A system for evaluating the contributions and proposals totally new will automatically identify the users who write better and those who write worse by allowing them to write and evaluate better within the system.

Finally, an implementation of the method schulze will always hold genuine elections within groups or to choose the best among the proposals.

Absolutely simple and intuitive interface will allow everyone in a short time, to find all the information they want.

Reference website

Installation and Setup

You can install Airesis to run locally on your machine, or if you prefer using Docker containers for a quick and easy setup.

Requirements

PostgreSQL 9 with the hstore extension enabled.
Redis in order to execute Sidekiq and all background jobs.
A JVM installed to run SOLR server, used for searching inside Airesis.

Local installation

Download the project

git clone https://github.com/coorasse/Airesis.git
cd airesis

Install the libraries

bundle

Configure environment variables (such as PayPal, Google Maps API, etc.), run

cp config/application.example.yml config/application.yml

then edit the .yml file and set your custom values 4. Bootstrap the database, populating it with initial data (be advised: it needs ~ 5 minutes)

bundle exec rake db:setup

Run Airesis

bundle exec rails s

run SOLR

bundle exec rake sunspot:solr:run

run Sidekiq

bundle exec sidekiq

Done! You have now a working version of Airesis!

Foreman

If you want to run all processes in a single command you can use Foreman

bundle exec foreman start

and it will take care of running everything for you.

Mailman

Users can reply in the forum by email. Run

ruby script/mailman_server.rb

in background to receive emails and create forum posts from them.

Docker

See Docker README

SOLR

We strongly suggest to edit solrconfig.xml setting

  <autoCommit> 
    <maxTime>500</maxTime>
    <openSearcher>false</openSearcher> 
  </autoCommit>

  <autoSoftCommit> 
    <maxTime>500</maxTime>
  </autoSoftCommit>

To generate new collections create another solr subfolder like solr/new_collection and in solr.xml add <core name="new_collection" instanceDir="." dataDir="new_collection/data"/>

Seeding more data

You'll probably need some fake data in your development environment to test stuff. These scripts are available:

bundle exec rake airesis:seed:more:public_proposals[number]

Will generate number fake proposals in public open space and number new users (one for each proposal)

bundle exec rake airesis:seed:more:votable_proposals[number]

Will generate number fake proposals in public open space in vote for the next three days and number new users (one for each proposal)

bundle exec rake airesis:seed:more:clear_proposals

Destroy all the proposals in the database

To generate other fake data look at spec/factories folder.

Environment variables

Look at application.example.yml for a detailed explanation of each environment variable.

I18n

Contribute on Crowdin to the Translation of the project

What else should I know? What are we working on right now?

We want to take out everything which is related to our installation and make it easier to install.

Our main goal is to make it even more simple and usable for everybody!

The author

Alessandro Rodi (coorasse@gmail.com)

Contributors

List of Contributors to the project Airesis

Tecnologie Democratiche Association

License

This software is released under AGPL .

For the terms of the license can be found in the LICENSE file available within the project.

Anyone which installs the application and is required to comply with the terms of the license and to incorporate in the footer of the website the following statement:

Powered by <a href="https://www.airesis.eu"> Airesis - The Social Network for eDemocracy </a>

codemilan/Airesis