django-calaccess-campaign-browser

A Django app to refine and investigate campaign finance data drawn from the California Secretary of State’s CAL-ACCESS database.

Intended as a second layer atop django-calaccess-raw-data that transforms the source data and loads it into simplified models that serve as a platform for investigative analysis.

Warning

This is a work in progress. Its analysis should be considered as provisional until it is further tested and debugged.

Documentation

• How to use it
  • Installing the Django app
  • Connecting to a local database
  • Loading the data
  • Exploring the data
• Management commands
  • Loaders
  • Exporters
  • Scrapers
  • Other
• Models
• How to contribute
  • Installing the database
  • Loading the data
• Exporting the data
• Importing to Microsoft SQL Server
  • Setting up pypyodbc
  • Connecting to the server
  • Import data into SQL Server
• Changelog
  • 0.1.1 (February 2015)
  • 0.1.0 (2014)

Open-source resources

• Code: github.com/california-civic-data-coalition/django-calaccess-campaign-browser
• Issues: github.com/california-civic-data-coalition/django-calaccess-campaign-browser/issues
• Packaging: pypi.python.org/pypi/django-calaccess-campaign-browser
• Testing: travis-ci.org/california-civic-data-coalition/django-calaccess-campaign-browser
• Coverage: coveralls.io/r/california-civic-data-coalition/django-calaccess-campaign-browser

Read more

• ‘CAL-ACCESS Dreaming’, the kickoff presentation from the initial code convening (Aug. 13, 2014)
• ‘Introducing the California Civic Data Coalition’, a blog post annoucing the first public code release (Sept. 24, 2014)
• ‘Package data like software, and the stories will flow like wine’, a polemic explaining this project’s software design philosophy (Sept. 24, 2014)
• ‘Light everywhere: The California Civic Data Coalition wants to make public datasets easier to crunch’, a story about the creators by Nieman Journalism Lab (Oct. 20, 2014)
• ‘Once a crusader against big money, Gov. Brown is collecting millions’, a Los Angeles Times story that utilized this application (Oct. 31, 2014)

Events

Development has been advanced by a series of sprints supported by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

• August 13-15, 2014, at Mozilla’s offices in San Francisco
• January 14-15, 2015, at USC’s Wallis Annenberg Hall
• March 4-8, 2015, the California Code Rush at NICAR 2015 in Atlanta

Sponsors