thomasgassmann / votewatch

Visualizing lobbyism in swiss politics

Vote Watch

[[TOC]]

Team Members

1. Marc Andriu Carigiet
2. Thomas Gassmann
3. Nick Ciardiello
4. Thierry Meier

Project Description

Have a look at the project pitch

Project Goals

Besides the high-level goals defined in pitch, we aim to implement the four subtasks as defined in Tasks.

Data Sources

See the references section of pitch.

Tasks

Bill-By-Bill (Visualization)

high-level idea: Uncover the lobbies and how they vote with respect to each bill. Bills are sorted by some property, which results in a searchable list the user can interact with.

primarily responsible: Marc

Lobbying Dynamics (Visualization)

high-level idea: Visualize the lobbying organizations as network diagram. That is visualizing the influence that organizations have on each other as well as on the different political parties.

primarily responsible: Thierry

points to note:

• incorporate information about
  • the political parties
  • the degree of influence on (other organizations | the different parties)
    • possible encodings: color, edge weight
• given a bill, visualize the organizations and their influence on the parliamentary voters
  • this could be a useful extension to the Bill-By-Bill subtask

Parliamentarian Pie (Visualization)

high-level idea: Visualize the (seating | political party) arrangement of the parliament as half-disk. The user should be able to interact with the elements of this chart. When an element is clicked, it should display various statistics. E.g. if the element is a parliamentarian, statistics could include trivia such as the name and the party but also other information regarding lobbying, e.g. what connection an individual has to an organization (e.g. position) and how it governs their relationship.

primarily responsible: Thomas

points to note:

• the important parts about the displayed statistics of a parliamentarian are the incoming/outgoing connections to special interest agents
  • there is a lot of freedom in what statistics are to be reported
• if the visualization works for selecting a single element, one could extend the functionality to select two elements and compare their individual and mutual connections.

Front- & Backend (Organization)

high-level idea: This subtask is involved with the design of the frontend and how to user interacts between the three previously described visualizations. That is providing a unifying and coherent user experience/interface, which allows the user to explore the different interactive visualizations. Furthermore, this role encompasses the design of the backend which allows to efficiently cache and conveniently retrieve all the data needed by the visualizations through a well-defined interface.

primarily responsible: Nick

points to note:

• each of the visualization subtasks are required to bring forth the data they essentially need to simplify the design of the backend.
• preliminary idea for frontend
  • search bar/list for the bills with the possibility to switch between the 3 tabs (i.e. one for each visualization)

Requirements

Write here all instructions to build the environment and run your code.
NOTE: If we cannot run your code following these requirements we will not be able to evaluate it.

We are using a monorepo based on turbo. As a package manager we're using pnpm. A postgres database is required to store the imported data which is aggregated from LobbyWatch and the Swiss parliament.

How to Run

Write here DETAILED instructions on how to run your code.
NOTE: If we cannot run your code following these instructions we will not be able to evaluate it.

Docker

This repo is configured to be built with Docker. To build all apps in this repo:

docker build . -t votewatch

To run the built image:

docker run -p 5173:5173 -it votewatch

Open http://localhost:5173.

Local Development

1. Run pnpm install in the root directory.
2. Run docker compose up in a separate terminal to start the database. All .env files should have already been configured.
3. Run pnpm run db:generate as well as pnpm run db:push in packages/database to generate the database schema.
4. Run pnpm run start in apps/fetcher to execute the fetcher script against the database. This will populate the database with data aggregated from LobbyWatch and the Swiss parliament.
5. Run pnpm run dev in apps/frontend to start the NextJS development server.

Milestones

Document here the major milestones of your code and future planned steps.\

• Milestone 1
  • mockup: bill-by-bill
  • mockup: lobbying dynamics
  • mockup: parliamentarian pie
  • mockup: frontend
• Milestone 2
  • data requirements: bill-by-bill requirements
  • data requirements: lobbying dynamics mockup
  • data requirements: parliamentarian pie mockup
  • design: backend
• Milestone 3
  • preliminary implementation: bill-by-bill
  • preliminary implementation: lobbying dynamics
  • preliminary implementation: parliamentarian pie
  • preliminary implementation: backend
• Milestone 4
  • integration: backend with bill-by-bill
  • integration: backend with lobbying dynamics
  • integration: backend with parliamentarian pie
  • implementation: frontend
• Milestone 5
  • integration: frontend with bill-by-bill
  • integration: frontend with lobbying dynamics
  • integration: frontend with parliamentarian pie
• Milestone 6
  • finalize

Create a list subtask.
Open an issue for each subtask. Once you create a subtask, link the corresponding issue.
Create a merge request (with corresponding branch) from each issue.
Finally accept the merge request once issue is resolved. Once you complete a task, link the corresponding merge commit.
Take a look at Issues and Branches for more details.

This will help you have a clearer overview of what you are currently doing, track your progress and organise your work among yourselves. Moreover it gives us more insights on your progress.

Weekly Summary

Write here a short summary with weekly progress, including challanges and open questions.
We will use this to understand what your struggles and where did the weekly effort go to.

Week 1 (Semester Week 10)

Meeting was held (approx. 60 minutes) discussing details of the app (i.e. visualizations) and how to split the work.

Week 2 (Semester Week 11)

Milestones 1 & 2 should be completed by Friday, 1st of December, 13:00

Week 3 (Semester Week 12)

Milestones 1 & 2 are finished. Furhter steps were disucssed:

• Using Gitlab milestones and Gitlab issues for development tasks form now on, also work with merge requests
• Using shadcn as a component library
• Using Prisma ORM for data access
• Signed up for status update meeting on 14th of December
• Discussed data requirements, preliminary data access should be implemented by the end of this week

Week 4 (Semester Week 13)

• Initial work on frontend and infrastructure
• Project progress meeting was held on 14th of December
• Data schema created, postgres database and data access up and running

Week 5

• Worked on the visualizations
• Data import and aggregation
• Integrate different visualizations into app