AppCivist (www.appcivist.org) is a software platform for democratic assembly and collective action that lets users design their own participatory processes, with modular components, to organize democratic action. The project is a collaboration between the Social Apps Lab @ CITRIS at the University of California, Berkeley and Inria@Silicon Valley.
The platform is composed by 4 components, described below. To learn more about each, read the Project Documentation below.:
- AppCivist Docker Dompose: docker compose and docker container images for the whole project. We recommend starting here for installing the ecosystem.
- AppCivist Core Platform: this repository contains the source code of the core backend for AppCivist. The core platform provides a RESTful API for managing User authentication, Assembly and Contribution Making.
- AppCivist-PB UI: main User Interface of the AppCivist Project for civic engagement proccesses like participatorty budgeting or planning.
- AppCivist Voting API: prototype implementation of a Ballot Based Voting API that allows both registered and non-registered users to cast votes on AppCivist users contributions.
- AppCivist Notification Service: prototype implementation of notification service running over RabbitMQ.
Altogether, the AppCivist-PB prototype UI connects to both to the AppCivist Core Platform and the AppCivist Voting API to provide a full experience of configurable assembly making.
To start playing with the platform, read the Getting Started with the AppCivist Guide, download the source code, install the platform and run it
- AppCivist Technical Documentation and Development Guide (github) explains how to contribute to the project development, starting from the appcivist core platform.
- AppCivist API Docs include the API documentation for the two main APIs in use by the AppCivist UI:
- AppCivist Core Definitions (gdoc) offers an overview of the key concepts we use in our platform.
- AppCivist Conceptual Architecture Documentation (gdoc) is a conceptual description of the architecture, detailing the ideal components we have envisioned.
- AppCivist-PB User’s Guide (gdoc) is a simple, screen-based, user guide of the current user interface prototype that supports proposal and decision making activities for participatory budgeting.
- AppCivist 2-pages Product Pitch (gdoc) gives a quick overview of the project and its main ideas as a quick 1-page product pitch.
Created by the Social Apps Lab at CITRIS, University of California, Berkeley. The Social Apps Lab Team is led by Prof. James Holston (Director) and Dr. Cristhian Parra (Chief Developer). In partnership with the MiMove Team at INRIA, France, led by Dr. Valérie Issarny. This project was developed with funding from the EIT Digital, as a part of the EIT-Digital Activity CivicBudget in collaboration with TUB, Nexus, and Missions Publiques. Contributions from City of Vallejo, and the Participa Project at DEI/Universidad Católica de Asunción (UC). 2017 © Regents of the University of California
All the components of this software are provided under a dual license model designed to meet the development and distribution needs of both open source projects and commercial use.
For open source projects, AppCivist is distributed free under the terms of the Social Apps Lab Open Source License. If you intend to use this software for commercial purposes, contact the project members below.
- James Holston: jholston AT berkeley DOT edu (Director, Social Apps Lab)
- Cristhian Parra cdparra AT gmail DOT com (Chief Developer)