arrmac/cityvoice

A place-based call-in system for gathering and sharing community feedback

CityVoice

About

CityVoice is a place-based call-in system to collect community feedback on geographic entities (like vacant properties) using the simple, accessible medium of the telephone.

Status

CityVoice's current code base is early stage software. The project was a rapid-iteration experiment for South Bend, IN during the 2013 CfA fellowship, and still has a lot of South Bend-specific logic hard-coded in. Generalizing for reuse is an ongoing project.

For details on the status of CityVoice, check out the "State of the CityVoice" document, in particular:

• High-level status summary
• Proposed strategy for generalizing for reuse

If you're interested in using (or helping out with!) CityVoice, please contact Dave (@allafarce on Twitter) or open an Issue with a description of how you're thinking of using it (this is helpful in informing the code base's generalization.)

Dependencies

The main dependency for this app is use of the Twilio telephony API (you'll need a voice phone number.) The app is also built with Rails, Postgres, and is best documented for use on the Heroku web app hosting platform.

Deprecation Notice

The below sections are deprecated. If you're interested in playing around with CityVoice in it's current state, it is recommended you use the "revamp-for-local-setup" branch, and look at the "Getting Started" document.

Setup (Internal Documentation) -- deprecated

To set up the Monroe Park pilot, you'll want to set a MONROE_PILOT environment variable on your server to true.

For example, on Heroku:

heroku config:set MONROE_PILOT=true

To get going, you'll need to run the following rake tasks in this order:

rake db:migrate
rake reset:voice_files
rake reset:questions
rake property_data:import
rake property_data:add_monroe_phone_codes

Also, for now, we set the name of the survey in the environment. Example: SURVEY_NAME=iwtw

Lastly, you will need to link your instance of the app to a Mapbox map via setting an environment variable called MAPBOX_MAP_ID. For example:

MAPBOX_MAP_ID=myaccountname.h8hskena

Email notifications -- deprecated

The first step for email notifications is to set the APP_URL environment variable to your root application URL. It should include http:// but exclude the trailing forward slash.

An example for setting this up on Heroku with a custom domain of myappdomain.com:

heroku config:set APP_URL=http://www.myappdomain.com

Email notifications are sent via the rake notifications:send task, which should be scheduled as a regularly-run job.

On Heroku, this is most easily done using the scheduler add-on:

heroku addons:add scheduler:standard
heroku addons:open scheduler

Once in the web interface, set up a new scheduled job with the rake notifications:task to be run at whatever interval you want.

Heroku Deployment -- deprecated

To deploy on Heroku, you'll need to do the following:

# Turn on experimental env variable feature
heroku labs:enable user-env-compile
# Add the Postgresql add-on 
heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql
# Find the URL for the database by running the config command and set a DATABASE_URL variable
heroku config # Look for your postgres URL in the output!
heroku config:set DATABASE_URL=yourpostgresURLgoeshere

In production, you may want to set up Google Analytics (hard-coded ID for now, so need to tinker) with the environment variable used as a flag:

• GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ON=true

If you want HTTP basic authentication enabled, you can set the following environment variables:

• LOCK_CITYVOICE=true
• CITYVOICE_LOCK_USERNAME=myusername
• CITYVOICE_LOCK_PASSWORD=mypassword