techforwarren / start-here

Our mission, contributor guidelines, and active project list

techforwarren/start-here

Welcome! This GitHub organization is run by a volunteer group of technologists who are mobilizing their skills to help Elizabeth Warren clinch the nomination and win in 2020. Our mission is to build tools, apps, websites, infrastructure, and any technologies that will engage grassroots supporters and empower our movement.

How to Join

Our group is organized through the All in for Warren digital community. Applying with this link will initiate the onboarding process and notify moderators of your specific interest in joining the (Let's Build) Tech for Warren group. Note that there are many other community groups you can follow based on geography, identity, and interest, and you can sign up for as many as you like.

How to Promote

As our digital projects turn into shareable products, we could use your help in making them visible to Warren supporters and potential Democratic Primary voters. We encourage you to share public-facing links to projects that are "in production" with your own social networks. If you are active on other All-In groups, post there. If you are active on social media, share with your followers. If you organize locally, make your fellow volunteers aware of tools and content we're creating — and come back to us with their suggestions and use cases! A project you can promote right now is the Event Map.

How to Contribute

If you are looking for a place to start, take a look below at our list of active projects, which are in various states of development. Whatever your skillset, there are many ways to contribute. Some of our current needs include: responding to developer requests for help in implementing specific features, testing and debugging prototypes, suggesting/providing UX enhancements (like improved accessibility), and supporting team efforts as a project maintainer. Take a look at the issues in project repos and discussion threads on project Slack channels to see where help is needed on specific projects. (Please note that registering with the All-In Community is a prerequisite to joining our tech volunteer Slack workspace.)

Another way to get started is to jump onto one of our topic channels on Slack to see what other folks are talking about and propose new project ideas. Currently, we have channels for #data and #front-end. New project ideas will be fielded by this organization's maintainers and passed along to others in the volunteer community for feedback and consideration. To be actively supported by the volunteer community, a project must (at minimum) establish a clear goal, identify some relevant tools and frameworks, and demonstrate commitment by an individual or team to see the project through.

Contributors are expected to adhere to our code of conduct.

Active Projects

In Production - with ongoing support

• Warren Plan Bot: public link, source code, Slack channel
• Event Map: public link, source code, Slack channel

In Development - prototyping and testing

• Two-Cent Tax project: Slack channel
• Digital Assistant Skills - "Tell me about Warren's plan for ...": Slack channel
• WarrenPlans interactive site

In Formation

• Voter Info Project: Slack channel

Completed Projects

• Tech For Warren logo/icon

Code of Conduct

• We have a zero-tolerance policy for spam, abuse, libel or defamation, incitement of violence, copyright infringement, or cyberbullying of any kind. You may be removed after your first offense of this type.
• No hateful conduct, harassment or threats will be tolerated in this community.
• Anything posted on this platform is public. Confidential information of any kind should not be posted and will be removed. Access may be restricted after the first violation.
• We do not allow spam or self-promotion of any kind. Please do not post anything that does not directly further this community’s mission.
• No sharing of unauthorized personal information of other members (e.g. address, phone number, or other personally identifying information that puts you or other members at risk).

start-here's Issues

Volunteer Management CRM

CRM to cover volunteer groups that don't have existing campaign-supported volunteer management tools

Voter Info Project

The idea is to create a website or widget to help voters find the information they need to vote/caucus in the primaries.

We can take this idea in stages, as follows:

1. When do I vote?
   At this stage, we basically take a primary election calendar and put a simple skin on it. For ex., prompt users for the state they live in with a simple select input, then report back the date of the relevant state's primary/caucus.

2. Where do I vote?
   At this stage, we prompt the user for an address, and then make a request to Google Civic API, or something similar, to get polling place information.

3. Follow-up
   At this stage, we try to collect name/email/SMS information for later follow-up - the idea being that someone who is motivated enough to find this information might be a good candidate for volunteering or other support.

4. Reminder to vote
   The basic idea here is to take the email/SMS information from stage 3 and use it to remind voters to go vote at the appropriate time. Perhaps with a one week/one day/6 hours kind of schedule, something like that. Note that we could easily incorporate elements of this idea earlier on - for example, in stage 1, we could develop an "Add this date to your Google Calendar" widget to make it easy for voters to incorporate election day into their plans.

5. Voter reg deadlines
   Here we would extend the functionality in stage 1 to include deadlines on when to register to vote. So for ex. if the user is from Massachusetts, we'd indicate that a) Primary Day is Mar 3, 2020 and b) the voter registration deadline is Feb 12, 2020. Bonus points for information about early voting and absentee voting! Rock the Vote seems to have a good database of dates here.

6. Register to vote / request an absentee ballot
   It would be really, really cool if we extended all of the above to actually give users the tools to register to vote, or to request an absentee ballot, right on the spot. That's a pretty tall order, though, so probably an easier lift is to just link them to TurboVote.

Do we need to do any org-wide Github Pages setup?

Hi @shaisachs ! I've got a first draft of the septdebates microsite up and running, mostly just testing out the templating and deploy to Github Pages. I followed this react-gh-pages guide to try and set up deployments, but when I go to https://techforwarren.github.io/septdebates , there's nothing there.

Any chance there's some org-wide config which needs to be set up? Or maybe a repo Setting I don't have access to modify? Looking forward to making these microsites easy to work with!

Create icon for Tech for Warren

Create an icon we can use for this github org and for community.elizabethwarren.com. Should use the EW colors:

Liberty green: #B7E4CF
red: #b61b28
blue: #232444

Who "owns" the techforwarren repo?

We're working on the social media bots that will respond to requests for Sen. Warren's policy proposals, but we have it in a separate repo for now because I don't know who has permissions to create new repos in this org.

It wouldn't hurt to migrate it over so other people can contribute if they want, but it would be helpful to know who to coordinate with to make that happen.

Thanks, in advance, for the help/follow up!

Microsite generator

Often in the day-to-day of the campaign, there's a big news moment that spurs a lot of interest, and it's worthwhile to spin up a quick microsite to capture enthusiasm generated by the moment. Generally the need in these sites is very simple (1-2 pages of a little content/video/imagery; signup form; donate button). It'd be nice to automate away as much of the drudgery as necessary - even up to and including domain name registration - so that someone in say the digital organizing operation could put one of these together in an hour.

Improve organization, housekeeping, communication of and about volunteer projects

It’s great to see that a few projects are getting off the ground. I’ve been following the conversations on the Slack channel and the Warren Groups app. It appears to me that would-be tech volunteers fall into one of two types: people who know what they want to work on and are ready to jump right in, and people who are excited to contribute but don’t know where to start.

Beyond the onboarding process that has already been set up via the app and Slack, I wondering what the volunteer organizers (and others) are thinking about how best to coordinate efforts and leverage the different skillsets of potential volunteers. While still encouraging a self-organizing process where people prototype, test, and get feedback on their own ideas, does it seem feasible to also maintain a centralized list with more clearly defined tasks that will give newcomers a place to start? Or is there a better way to link people who want to contribute with specific tasks?

Feel free to reach out to me on Slack if there is any way I can contribute on the organizing/communication side.

Show Me The Plan: Collection of Interactive Visualizations & Calculators

Update: If the project below sounds interesting, come over to techforwarren/policyboard! Submit issues with ideas, help gather research, find good new datasets, and let's make this happen 🎉

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This issue was originally about making something like the current elizabethwarren.com/plans page, but the cool thing I was hoping to help create are interactive plan/data-driven visualizations. The debt calculator is what got me thinking about this because it puts the policy in the terms of peoples' lives.

I think putting plans in terms of individual voter's lives is the big thing here, whether that's showing how a plan will benefit them, or how much the problem could be hurting them. A calculator for the affordable housing plan, for instance, could use their zip code to show how much Warren's plans would reduce average rent in their area/city. Something for climate change could show whether somebody is in outdated flood zone maps, or whether their risk for asthma/cancers is elevated.

The prior idea had so many pieces that it was tough to get a simple skeleton off the ground. For now I'm going to set up a basic tabbed page with one visualization. The CPFB dataset over in https://github.com/techforwarren/datasets seems like a great place to start! I'm going to borrow as much styling as I can from https://github.com/techforwarren/eventmap , see if we can start building out a shared design system.

Pledge to vote game

My basic concept here is to mash up the campaign's pledge to vote form (e.g. https://elizabethwarren.com/pledge/new-hampshire?source=web-join-us-nh) with a walk-a-thon type page. Here's the basic idea of how this would work:

• As a Warren supporter I create a "Why I support Warren" page with maybe my picture, a paragraph or two of text, and my vote pledge goal ("My goal is to get 25 pledges to vote!" or what have you.)
• At the bottom of the page is a "pledge to vote" form that includes name, email, etc.
• I share this page with my friends, via facebook/email/etc, and ask my friends to pledge to vote.
• As my friends pledge to vote on my page, I make progress towards my goal, and I can even bump it up if the pledge drive is going better than expected.
• We can gamify the whole thing with a leader board, or perhaps a leaderboard per state; fun badges like "Early State Superstar" for people who get a lot of pledges in IA/NH/NV/SC; and so on.
• Naturally, we make things viral by encouraging vote-pledgers to create their own "Why I support Warren" pages.
• And of course this idea pairs pretty nicely with #14, i.e. once someone pledges to vote we can make sure that person has the info needed to actually vote.

Medicare for All cost calculator

I would like to see a M4A cost calculator site/app into which people can input some basic information about their circumstances and current plan and get an estimate of cost savings under M4A.

The site should be able to create a basic monthly cost calculation based on premiums and should also be able to generate some scenarios that explain common "what if" situations. What-ifs might include:

1. Child birth
2. Emergency situation - e.g. car accident
3. Common chronic condition - e.g. diabetes

By registering the user would be able to save a scenario and , with their permission we would be able to use their contact details for communication and their anonymized scenario details for analytics.

The user should be able to sign up for news on the campaign and specific to healthcare.

Reddit Bot to Engage Users on Warren's Plans

Create interactive Bots to engage users and answer their questions

Just for disclosure, I am promoting some of the tools I have developed and the examples are to shed light on what is possible. Everything can be customized.

Our tools make it easy to curate digital links, comment on them, tag them and publish them into a content library.

My idea is simple. Let's curate all of Warren's posts on Social Media and her comments, organize and categorize them, then use Google's DiagFlow platform (This is an AI-based natural language processing Solution) to create interactive charts to both educate and answer voter questions in context!

I have been curating news on the Trump Presidency for 3 years. I have used my research an applied it to the concept above. I am making a couple of modifications to make the experience even better, but you can see the application from my example.

My chat example has answered a few questions on the Trump presidency to demonstrate the power of our solution.

Click here and the chat will appear at the bottom right corner of the page.

Digital Assistant Skills

Campaign is planning on doing audio recordings of EWs plans and would like to make those available as Alexa/Google Home skills so you can ask your digital assistant to tell you her latest plan, or ask for details about a specific plan.

There has been some discussion about possible frameworks and ability to share code with the Plan Bot project, but we will need one or two people to spearhead this project. Reach out to a moderator if you have relevant skills and would like to work on this.

Map of campaign events

Here’s our events API Documentation: https://github.com/mobilizeamerica/api

For example, to fetch all upcoming events nationally, request https://api.mobilize.us/v1/organizations/1316/events?timeslot_start=gte_now