Pabuviz

Pabuviz.org is a visualization platform for participatory budgeting (PB). It provides intuitive and visually appealing comparison tools based on real-life data from past PB elections. It can be used as a helper tool when discussing possible voting rules for PB.

This repository contains the Django project implementing the database used by the website. It works hand-in-hand with the pabuviz-web repository, which contains the React application implementing the website for pabuviz.org.

You can access the API by querying db.pabuviz.org/api. The documentation for the api is available directly at this link.

Development/Deployment

The database is implemented as a Django project. It acts as an API that is queried by the website to retrieve the information it needs.

Getting Started

Whether you are starting local development for pabuviz or you are setting up a server to host the database you need to initialise the project by implementing the following steps.

Local Settings

Parameterise the local settings by creating a pb_prototype\local_settings.py file that looks like this:

import os

# Build paths inside the project like this: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...)
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret! And update this fake one!
SECRET_KEY = 'secret'

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = True

# For production, update with the actual URL host
ALLOWED_HOSTS = [""]

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'pabuviz.db'),
    },
    'user_submitted': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'pabuviz_users.db'),
    }
}

STATIC_ROOT = "static/"

CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS = [
    "https://url.where.visualisation.site.is.org",
]

Python Setup

Install python libraries (depending on which database backend is used, you might install more packages accordingly):

pip install numpy django djangorestframework django-cors-headers pabutools

Database Setup

To create the databases, run the following:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py migrate --database user_submitted
python manage.py initialize_db 
python manage.py initialize_db --database user_submitted

You can then populate the database with precomputed example data (adding elections will take some time):

python manage.py add_election -d pabulib_samples/ -v 3
python manage.py import_election_properties -i pabulib_samples/Res_Election_InstanceProperties.csv -p pabulib_samples/Res_Election_ProfileProperties.csv
python manage.py import_rule_results pabulib_samples/Res_RuleResults.csv
python manage.py import_rule_result_properties pabulib_samples/Res_RuleResult_Properties.csv

It is also possible to populate it with your own .pb files and compute the properties:

python manage.py add_election -d <path to .pb file directory> -v 3
python manage.py compute_election_properties -v 3
python manage.py compute_rule_results -v 3
python manage.py compute_rule_result_properties -v 3

Update the Server

• SSH to the server
• Add your GitHub ssh key to the agent: ssh-add ~/.ssh/your_key
• Move to the folder of the Django project: cd django/pabiviz-db
• Pull the git: git pull
• If static files have been updated:
  • source ../venv/bin/activate
  • python manage.py collectstatic
• If the database needs updating:
  • source ../venv/bin/activate
  • python manage.py makemigrations
  • python manage.py migrate
• In any case, restart the uwsgi:
  • cd
  • ./restart_uwsgi.sh
• Log out from the server