Introduction

The Political Memory is a tool build by la Quadrature du Net. It follow several objectives: being a campaign tool, being able to display how well the elected representatives have followed the voting recommendations of la Quadrature du Net, increase the political cost of the decisions of elected representatives, gather official positions taken by elected representatives and, the most important one, inform citizens.

This is the second version of the tool.

Links

• code (and there is also a mirror on github)
• official la Quadrature du Net's instance
• Bug tracker
• dev blog
• mailing list

We also have an irc channel: irc.freenode.net#lqdn-memopol (english speaking but if you only know french we can deal with that) where you will be very welcome

How to contribute

Like in any free software project:

• clone it
• install it
• code
• optional: talk to us about it on irc or on the mailing list
• send a pull request either on gitorious or github
• hit us with a stick if we don't react (shouldn't happen)
• we merge your code, everyone is happy
• party hard
• start again

You can see the list of our awesome contributors in CREDITS.txt (if someone is missing just tell me).

Running tests

Projects tests are centralized in the tests dir.

To run tests, you just need to run nosetests in the project root directory.

The nose configuration is in the setup.cfg file.

Installation

Debian and debian-based

Install the base python virtualenv tools (on Ubuntu you have to enable universe):

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev python-pip libatlas-base-dev g++ mercurial git libtidy-dev imagemagick
sudo pip install virtualenv

Archlinux

Install the following to have the tools on Archlinux (please note that you may have to adapt the following install procedure):

pacman -S python2 libxml2 libxslt freetype2 python-lxml python2-pip python2-virtualenv libpng mercurial git imagemagick tidyhtml

Fedora

Install the following to have the tools on Fedora (please note that you may have to adapt the following install procedure):

yum install python-setuptools python-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel freetype freetype-devel libpng libpng-devel python-lxml python-pip atlas-devel g++ mercurial git imagemagick

pip-python install virtualenv

Installing python dependencies

We are using a virtualenv (there is everything needed to use buildout also if you want to).

Create one:

virtualenv --no-site-packages --distribute ve

Active it:

source ve/bin/activate

(If you want to leave it just type "deactivate")

Install memopol2's dependencies (yes you need to build numpy alone first):

pip install numpy==1.5.1
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the "migration" scripts

Warning: this might take a LOTS of time, around 15min.

python manage.py init

Do not try to run migrate by hand or you will have a bug due to fixtures loading and will end up with no eurodeputies fixtures.

Run the server

python manage.py runserver

Your application is available on http://localhost:8000/

And you're done, but you might want to take a look at the next section depanding on what you want to dev.

Updating memopol's data

Update European Parliament related data

Just run:

python manage.py update_meps

This might take some time. Be sure to do that after having run "init".

Adding a voting recommendation

First, you have to get all the votes data by running this command:

python manage.py import_ep_votes_data

If you want to update the available importables votes, just re-run this command.

Then you need to choose a vote on which you want to create a recommendation. For this: got to /votes/import/ on your instance (for example: http://mempol2.serverside.fr/votes/import/). There, you'll see the list of the importable votes (with not very user friendly name, those are the one given by the European Parliament). Choose a vote, click on it, grab it's "ID" as specified on his page, then run:

python manage.py create_voting_recommandation <vote id> <{for,against}> <weight of the recommendation> <weight of the proposal, 1 by default>

Where: the vote id is the idea you have chosen, for or against is your voting recommendation, weight of the recommendations is the weight you want to give to the recommendation (for exemple: the weight of the final vote is way more important than the one of a small amendment) and weight of the proposal is the weight of the total vote (for example: the vote on ACTA is way more important than the Lambrinidis rapport for la Quadrature du Net).

Example:

python manage.py create_voting_recommendation 8838 for 3 3

WARNING: due to the nature of the data, this last command has non-negligible chances of failing.

Personalization

Change the organization name

You can change the organization name displayed on the header in memopol2/settings.py by changing the ORGANIZATION_NAME variable.

Remove la Quadrature du Net data from Memopol

If you want to remove this data to use memopol for your own cause (yay \o/) a command is ready for you:

python manage.py remove_lqdn_data

This will remove everything related to the votes that we are tracking and the opinions. More customisability will appears in the future and better doc on how to use the cli tools.

Small lexicon

We try not to use it too much but you'll eventually end up on it so here is a reference.

• "mep" == member of the European Parliament
• "mp" == member of the Parliament, here it's deputies of the French national assemble

Licence

The Political is licenced under AGPLv3+. The original idea is from gibus.