The sway from plebeian-technology

What is Sway

Sway is a platform you can use to engage in the democratic process in the 21st century. With Sway, you can directly influence your elected representatives by voting on the same legislation that they do.

Sway was created to solve several issues of democracy:

Years can pass between elections that decide who will represent you.
Keeping track of how well your representatives have represented you can be difficult.

Because of these difficulties, it can be challenging to hold elected representatives accountable for their actions.

Participating
Locales
- Current Supported Locales
- Onboard a New Locale
Development
- Environment Variables
- Running Sway

Participating

Sway is a forever free to use and open source application. We do not have ads and we will never.

Sway relies on people like you to support this venture. To get started, please see our contributing guide.

tl;dr

Create an issue.
Fork this repo.
Update code as needed.
Open a pull request with your changes linked to the aforementioned issue.

Adding Your City, Region, and/or Country to Sway

Sway is designed to work with and be extended to multiple locations regardless of city, region or country, and anyone and everyone is free to onboard a new municipality or "locale" into Sway.

Current Supported Locales

Baltimore City, Maryland, United States - baltimore-maryland-united_states
United States Congress - congress-congress-united_states

Onboarding

To add a new locale, create a new Issue and label it as locale and include the below files:

An SVG image avatar for the locale, usually a flag representing that municipality. See /public/images/avatars/baltimore-maryland-united_states.svg as an example. Wikipedia and Twitter are good sources to get these from.
A .geojson file named <city>-<region>-<country>.geojson with locations of each district corresponding to the respective legislator. For example, GeoJSON data for Baltimore City can be found here - other cities may have similar sources.
Adding new Bills, Organizations and LegislatorVotes requires administrative access to Sway. More importantly it requires a commmitment to selecting, researching and summarizing a Bill of the Week each week for your Sway locale.
To add and/or update Legislators in Sway, please provide a legislators.json file. For an example of the file structure, see the Baltimore legislators.json file.

Once the above have been assembled, we will work with you to get them into Sway!

Development

Environment Variables

Create a .env.development file at the root directory of the project.

NOTE: All the values set here are only used for development and should NOT be commited to git. Values should not include opening and closing "".

Sign up for Twilio and set the values the below keys:

https://console.twilio.com/

You can get the ACCOUNT_SID and AUTH_TOKEN values by clicking "Account" at the top-right and then "API keys & tokens" on the left sidebar.

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=
TWILIO_VERIFY_SERVICE_SID=

To get a VERIFY_SERVICE_SID you must sign up for Twilio Verify, which Sway uses as one factor in the user authentication flow. To create a Verification Service you can use the Twilio API via the guide here - https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/api, or you can use the Twilio Console:

Click the "Develop" tab on the left sidebar.
Click "Explore Products +" on the left sidebar.
Scroll down and click "Verify".
Create a new Verify service.

Create a Google Cloud account and add values for the below keys:

https://cloud.google.com/

GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=

Sway uses Google Maps for geocoding user addresses into latitude/longitude coordinates during registration. These coordinates are then used with a geojson file and Census.gov API to determine a user's representatives in a given SwayLocale.

To create this key:

Click on the Navigation menu.
Hover over APIs & Services and click 'Enabled APIs & services'
Click the "+ ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES" button at the top.
Enable the "Maps JavaScript API"
On the sidebar, click "Keys & Credentials"
Generate an API Key with:
- a website restriction to localhost
- The "Maps JavaScript API" selected
- The "Places API" selected
- The "Geocoding API" selected

Create VAPID keys and set values for the keys below:

VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY=
VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY=

Sway uses these keys to send web push notifications via the web-push ruby gem.

You can generate keys after running bundle install by opening the rails console with rails c and running:

irb(main):001> WebPush.generate_key

=> #<WebPush::VapidKey:67d4 :public_key=BDH9S_5CtkeVBJmtGxcrXD7_bXyp4GyxYMiuH4Rlh0RW6dhsj3Arurxkf-0_BI2kLaUBFLcfIi9fi2K8wqxSUq0= :private_key=wsx-vK4_ZFULdXlqSnE2VJPc548k1ihydsfzqZKtDFY=>

Copy the full key, including the = at the end into each environment variable above.

You can read more about web push notifications here:

Add your phone number as an Admin phone number by setting the below key in the same format:

ADMIN_PHONES=1234567890

Only administrators can create new Bills in Sway.

Set a database password:

SWAY_DATABASE_PASSWORD=sway2000!!

Just a reminder that this is only used for development.

Running Sway

Create SSL Certificates

brew install mkcert
mkcert -install
mkcert localhost
mv localhost.pem config/ssl/cert.pem
mv localhost-key.pem config/ssl/key.pem

In one terminal window/tab/pane:

Set up Rails

bundle install
bundle exec rails db:create
bundle exec rails db:migrate
bundle exec rails db:schema:load

# Load seeds including locales and geojson files
bundle exec rails db:seed

Run Rails

bin/rails server -b 'ssl://localhost:3000?key=config/ssl/key.pem&cert=config/ssl/cert.pem&verify_mode=none'

In a second terminal window/tab/pane:

Setup React with Vite

npm install

Run React with Vite

./bin/vite dev

Browser

Open your browser to https://localhost:3000 to begin working with Sway.

Copyright / License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3.0 (or later); you may not use this work except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License in the LICENSE file, or at:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Plebeian Technologies, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation.

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