HelsinkiActivityStream

Publish OpenAhjo (https://github.com/City-of-Helsinki/openahjo) most recent agenda items in Activity Streams 2.0 format.

Setting up for Development

Requires Python 3.4

Creating a Python Virtual Environment

At the base level of the repository, create a python virtual environment using the pyvenv tool:

> pyvenv venv

Activate the environment with (again from the base level of the repo):

> source venv/bin/activate

(You can return to your default Python environment by typing deactivate at the command line)

Install development dependencies and run tests and linter with:

> ./pre_push.sh

Run Server Locally

At the repository root execute the following from the command line:

> python -m openahjo_activity_streams.server

Hosting

Heroku

The included Procfile configures Heroku to use gunicorn to serve the site.

Digital Ocean (or other Ubuntu servers)

Provisioning

To provision the server, you will need make sure the ansible_ssh_host variable in deployment.inventory is set to your server's IP address. Then run ansible-playbook deployment_playbook.yml -i deployment.inventory. This will install docker and a python3 docker image on your server.

Deployment

First make sure to add the appropriate ssh private key. Then, add the correct environment variables in the helsinkiAS.env file that is in the ops/ directory. Lastly, run the deploy script by first entering the ops/ directory by typing cd ops/ and running ./deploy.sh with environment variables USER and IP_ADDRESS set according to your server's details.

Converting from OpenAhjo to Activity Stream 2.0 Format

There is not currently an obvious mapping from the data published by the OpenAhjo project, and the Activity Stream 2.0 standard. For term definitions relating to the OpenAhjo project, see this. For those relating to the Activity Streams standard, see this and this.

High Level Description

At a high level, each activity item has the following structure:

{
    "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "published": "2015-08-28T11:06:47.879150",
    "type": "Add",
    "actor": {   },   // json object representing the policy committee making a decision
    "object": {   },  // json object representing the meeting agenda item during which the decision was made
    "target": {   }   // json object representing the issue about which the decision is being made
}

This represents a decision (the object) being made by a policy committee (the actor) about an issue (the target). The closest standard activity type we could identify in the Activity Stream 2.0 specifications was 'Add'.

At this point, the activity stream is served as an unwrapped json list of activity items, in preference to using the activity stream orderedCollection types:

[
   {...},
   {...},
   ...
]

Actor (OpenAhjo Policymaker)

• Has the Group type, as this represents a group of entities capable of acting

Object (OpenAhjo Agenda Item)

• Has the Content type, representing an arbitrary piece of content
• The content attribute of this object is populated from text contained in the first element of the content list in the OpenAhjo AgendaItem.

Target (OpenAhjo Issue)

• Has the Content type, representing an arbitrary piece of content
• The content attribute is populated from the summary field of the issue record in the AgendaItem, if the summary field exists; otherwise left blank.