A light implementation of Liquid Democracy.

It is "light" with respect to:

• Technology:

  • It uses a Neo4j-Graphdatabase via bulbs (http://bulbflow.com), i.e. a REST-interface (instead of a RDBMS)
  • It uses the Python micro webframework Flask (instead of a full-blown framework like Django or Pyramide)
  • No caching
  • No i18n
  • Little security
  • Hardly any javascript

• Software Engineering:

  • No fancy abstraction layers
  • No built-in version-management of items.
  • No "Design Patterns".

• Requirements: It implements just the core set of requirements, i.e.

  • Instances: An instance comprises a set of proposals and users. -- implemented --
  • Users: Basic user-management (login, sign-in, logout) -- implemented --
  • Proposals: Add, delete, view Proposals. -- implemented --
  • Voting: One Up-Vote/Down-Vote per User per Proposal / Comment. -- implemented --
  • Comments: Add, delete and vote for discussion-comments of a proposal. -- implemented --
  • Rationals: Add, delete and vote for pro-/con-rationals of a proposal. -- not yet implemented --
  • Delegations: Delegate own vote to other user(s) relative to parlament, proposal or whole instance. -- right in the process of being implemented -- (I dont yet know: Should the delegation also be projected to past actions?)
  • Parlaments: Add, delete Parlaments (in which proposals can be raised); actually, that's nothing but a mechanism to tag proposals. -- just implemented --

Install on a Linux-System

• Install neo4j and neo4j-server to a path of your choice (say: /path/to/neo4j) and start the server via

  $ cd /path/to/neo4j
  $ bin/neo4j start

• create a new local python environment

  $ virtualenv venv

• activate the environment

  $ source venv/bin/activate

• Install Flask and Bulbs

  (venv)$ pip install flask
  (venv)$ pip install bulbs

• clone/copy this git-repo and start the main programm

  (venv)$ git clone https://github.com/phynfo/LiquidDemocracy-XXS.git liquidDemocracyXXS
  (venv)$ cd LiquidDemocracy-XXS
  (venv)$ python liquidDemocracyLight.py

  Be sure not to use the global /usr/bin/python-Python but the local .../venv/bin/python-Python of the local environment.

• open a webbrowser and call http://localhost:5000

Use the Test Data

• You are free to use the Neo4j-test data, provided in the data-folder of this repository.

• It contains proposals (written in german), Users (which all use the password bla; the admin-user is

• tobias), Comments (written in german), Parlaments, Votings, two Instances.

• Install the test data by copying the data-Folder to /path/to/neo4j (probably just copying will work, however I am not fully sure about it). :

Install on Windows

I found it much easier to set up the development environment on a Linux-System. Perhaps you want to install Linux e.g. on VirutalBox inside Windows and go on with the above instructions? If not, try to do the following:

Install python, setuptools and pip

• install setuptools from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

• Add C.\Python2x\ and C:\Python2x\scripts to the windows path variable

• Open a new DOS shell and run

  > easy_install pip
  

• activate the environment

  > \path\to\env\Scripts\activate
  

• install flask, bulbs and dateutil

  > pip install flask
  > pip install bulbs
  > pip install python-dateutil
  

  Note: To get it all working, you must have a compiler installed (e.g. Visual Studio 2008 or mingw)

• Download the latest stable release of the Neo4j-Graphdatabase (http://neo4j.org)

• Start the Neo4j-Server (you need a Java Runtime Environment for that):

  > bin\Neo4j.bat
  

• Run the script liquidDemocracy.py with python; a Test-Webserver is included.