This project is currently in MVP stage. We are currently working on getting this project to feature parity with the existing opendisclosure.io website.

Open Disclosure California provides transparent, non-partisan campaign contribution and expenditure data in an accessible and easy to understand format. We hope this site will engage the voting public and raise awareness and accountability. Ultimately, this is one step toward shifting politics into a movement of civic engagement and ultimate citizen action.

Welcome! We are a coalition of brigades, all volunteers from the California. We would love to get help from folks across the state to help us in building a database of campaign finance data for local jurisdictions across the state.

www.opendisclosure.io is one piece of the ODCA project. We try to keep our project page up to date with all the information about how we work and where to get looped in.

We're maintaining a high-level list of work for our MVP in this project board.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

• Ruby 2.3
• Bundler gem
• Make

Optionally:

• Node 8.9

$ bundle install
$ make build
$ make serve

Open your web browser to http://localhost:4000/.

This project started as an experiment. Here is what we learned:

• ballots should probably just be renamed elections.
• naming of the files is very important, it's how we reference relationships between entities. Best is to use the full path name which would be unique per entity.
• Info we attribute to candidates, like bio, occupation, website, etc, should those be frozen in time based at the time of election? For example, London Breed is now running for Mayor, so many of these attributes have changed since the last election. Would folks be interested in seeing snapshots of websites, at the time of a previous election? i.e. should past elections just be snapshots of the opendisclosure website?
• supporting/opposing committees for a referendum should be stored within the referendum?

Run the tests

$ make test

The process of downloading, converting, and calculating the reported financial disclosures is handled by disclosure-backend-static. To get the finance data into this project, we use gulp.js to copy the files over and do some light transformations on them to get them into a Jekyll Collection.

We commit all the finance data to this repo so that you do not need to use the gulp tasks to help with this project. You only need to run the gulp tasks if you want the latest finance data.

This process is optional and temporary. It allows us to update the finance data while allowing local modifications and overrides. If you have thoughts on how this could be improved, let us know!

In order to get the latest finance data, first clone disclosure-backend-static as a sibling to this project's directory. It is important that the disclosure-backend-static project is cloned to the correct path (../disclosure-backend-static) which is hardcoded in the gulpfile (pull requests welcome).

Next, follow the instructions in disclosure-backend-static and run a build. Then you can run the npm task:

$ npm run pull

This will copy over all files as-is and will overwrite any local modifications. It's important to review the changes before committing them so as not to lose any intentional changes.

Content for this website is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.

    www.opendisclosure.io California’s online source for local campaign finance data
    Copyright (C) 2018  CA Civic Lab

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
    published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
    License, or (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.