Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform

The Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform has been developed by the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team. The platform is being used by many cities across the United States for hosting participatory budgeting elections. You can check out the live platform hosted at https://pbstanford.org/.

The platform is built with Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, jQuery, and React.

Requirements

• Ruby: >= 3.2.1
• Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite (Preferrred: MySQL)

Getting Started

1. Download the project to your local machine.
2. Add your local database configuration to a config/database.yml file using the config/database.yml.example file for reference.
3. Run the bin/setup executable which installs all the dependencies for the project as well as sets up the database.
4. Add the following credentials to a config/secrets.yml file using the config/secrets.yml.example file for reference:
   • Generate a private key for signing cookies and add it to secret_key_base. Do not use the key in the example file.
   • Create an email account for sending emails and add it to email.
   • (Optional) Create a Twilio account for sending SMS and add it to twilio.
   • (Optional) Sign up for a Google Maps API key for showing maps on the website and add it to google_maps_api_key.
5. Start the local Rails server on your machine by using the rails server command and then run the application by opening http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
6. You can access the admin interface by going to http://localhost:3000/admin and logging in with the email "s@s" and password "superadmin123". Change the password to something more secure immediately after the first login.

Contributing

We currently do not accept pull requests. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us at contact@pbstanford.org

License

Participatory Budgeting Platform is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3.