Civic Echo

Civic Echo is a lightweight app used for dynamic survey generation based on YAML files. Coupled with DeepL, it can handle multiple languages easily.

It is initiated for demaincestaujourdhui.online, led by Genève en Transition and Grand Genève en transition.

Civic Echo can store two kinds of data:

• Responses data with no link to the respondent, stored in a Mongo database.
• Respondents data who agreed to provide their information, stored in a Notion database

How does it work ?

1. Create questions in a YAML file for each language

Civic Echo uses a standardized YAML file format to describe questions and locales for a specific language. See langs directory for examples of YAML files.

We provide some tools to help you generate YAML files:

• notion-yaml: Generate a YAML file from a database in Notion.
• translations: Translate an input YAML file to another language using DeepL.

2. Provide the YAML files to the app

Put the YAML files in the app/langs directory and update the index.ts to add languages detection.

This step is a bit cumbersome. If you want to help us improve it, we are open to contributions.

app/
  ...
  langs/
    index.ts
    de.yaml
    en.yaml
    fr.yaml
    pt.yaml

# app/langs/index.ts
import fr from "./fr.yaml";
import en from "./en.yaml";
import de from "./de.yaml";
import pt from "./pt.yaml";

export const LANGS = ["fr", "en", "pt", "de"];

const langs: LangContent[] = [fr, en, de, pt];

export const getLangContent = (targetLang: string) => {
  return langs.find(lang => lang.lang === targetLang);
};

export default langs;

3. Adapt configuration

To store data, Civic Echo needs environment variables to connect to databases. Create an .env file in the app/ directory with following content:

MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017
NOTION_DBID=<Notion database ID to store respondents data>
NOTION_TOKEN=<Your Notion token with access to the db>

More documentation can be found in the app directory.

4. Run the app

yarn start # or 'npm start'

This command will install dependencies, build app and start it.