Theodorus - A Stub to Democracy

Theodorus is a decision-making system, allowing users to collaboratively craft a law proposal. Any user may raise an idea for a law and if there are enough people voting for the idea, it will become a discussion. Users then may propose their own version for each of the law's section and vote for the favorite alternative. Once enough people support the law it will turn to a A bill and be given a limited time in which all participants vote in favor or against turning it into a Law.

The goal of Theodorus is to provide an easy-to-use Direct Democracy, to educate people to participate in the political debate and encourage them to express themselves politically.

• This is my first open-source project at github, so I'm still learning the trade. Please bare with me. ** I will appreciate any feedback regarding the project itself and its maintenance.

Models

• User
  • It has login credentials (username, password)
• Community
  • User can belong to one or more communities
  • A community can be visible to all or to members-only
  • Joining a community can be limited to invitation-only, invitation and/or request, free for all
  • User can create their own communities
  • Community has a name, a description and a logo
  • Community can decide whether permissions and penalties are visible or private
• Membership is the relationship between a user and a community
  • It has a display name
  • It has a profile image
  • It has a score
  • It has bio (100 words)
  • It has the set of available permissions
  • It has a list of penalties
  • It has the flag "moderator"
  • It has a flag "public" making all his actions visible to other members in the community
  • It has the flag "representative" (so others members can endorse him)
• ProfileImage is an image that belongs to a user
  • he can link it to different memberships
  • user can add up to 10 different profileImages
  • User can only remove profilesImages that are not linked to a membership
• Message can be either:
  • Topic is the beginning of a discussion in a community.
    • It contains a message of 140 characters
    • It may contain up to 140 different links
    • It has a single creator (a user)
  • Response is a user's response to a topic
    • It contains a message of 140 characters (or 140 links)
    • A user may have a single response per topic
  • Comment is a feedback to a response or to another comment
    • It contains a message of 100 words
    • A user may have many comments to per response
• Rating is set of values a user can give to topic/response/comment
  • It contains the flags - Endorse, Follow, Report
  • Endorse and Report are mutually exclusive
• Interaction is the relationship between user to another user in his community
  • He can follow (meaning, he'll get notification on the user's activities)
  • He can endorse (meaning, he'll automatically endorse anything the representative will endorse)
  • He can report of misconduct

Settings to configure

The following items should be configured as a environment variables (that way they are hidden by anyone plainly looking at your code). Use the command line (or terminal console) to set them: E.g. setenv THEODORUS_MAIL_SERVICE Gmail You can also write them to your config.json which is much easier, but less secured. Please note that environment variables overrides config.json

• process.env.THEODORUS_MODE : "dev", "test", "prod"
• RSA information:
  • process.env.THEODORUS_RSA_ENCRYPT
  • process.env.THEODORUS_RSA_DECRYPT
  • process.env.THEODORUS_RSA_MODULUS
• OPENSHIFT infromation (this is set automatically by open-shift)
  • process.env.OPENSHIFT_NODEJS_IP
  • process.env.OPENSHIFT_NODEJS_PORT
• DB information
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MYSQL_HOST
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MYSQL_PORT
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MYSQL_USER
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MYSQL_PASSWORD
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MYSQL_SCHEMA
• Mailer information
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MAIL_SERVICE (e.g. "Gmail")
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MAIL_USER (e.g. "[email protected]")
  • process.env.THEODORUS_MAIL_PASSWORD (e.g. "7ru57n01")

Installation

1. sign up for openshift
2. create a new app
3. Use cartridge "node.js 0.10"
4. use the git source code https://github.com/odedshr/theodorus.git master
5. "I would like to make changes in the code" - setup your public key
6. Add cartridge "MySQL 5.5"
7. Enable Jenkins
8. You may want to add phpMyAdmin 4.0 if you used non-scalable process
9. For local server 9.2 the above mentioned settings:

sudo vi /etc/launchd.conf

9.1. be sure to install Imagemagick (for mac os x it's "brew install imagemagick") 10. make sure git won't delete the profile-images folder:

rhc ssh -a #cartridge_name#
cd /runtime/theodorus-profile-images
touch .gitkeep

Release Notes

• 2013/08/31 - v0.1 - stub (nothing there really) [...]
• 2016/04/30 - v0.2.2 - add RouteManager and MockRequest to simulate REST-server for testing
• 2016/05/20 - v0.2.3 - cronJob Scoring, Tags
• 2016/05/24 - v0.2.4 - Added community age & gender restrictions DB updates: User.isFemale=>user.gender, community.gender.neutral=>undefined
• ? - v0.2.5 - +community.hasImage -membership.communityType