We're building a publicly-owned political dialogue platform.

As a nonprofit that's building open-source technology, Asq.Us is bridging the gap between you and your elected officials.

This is the 'townhall' of the 21st century.

By using the internet, we can finally connect the people that make up America's democracy.

asq.us

• Ruby 1.9.3
• rubygems
• postgresql

You will need to:

• Install git, a distributed version control system. Read the Github Git Guides to learn how to use git.
• Install Ruby, a programming language. You can use MRI Ruby 1.9.3 (http://rubyenterpriseedition.com/). Your operating system may already have it installed or offer it as a pre-built package. (Good link for install RVM and Ruby 1.9 required for the new project. (http://jaysonrowe.blogspot.com/2012/04/installing-ruby-and-rails-on-fedora.html)
• Install RubyGems 1.8.x or newer, a tool for managing software packages for Ruby.
• Install Postgresql, a relational database. Your operating system may already have it installed or offer it as a pre-built package. We recommend installing it NOT from source, but from a package installer. (details below)
• Install Bundler, a Ruby dependency management tool. You should run gem install bundler as root or an administrator after installing Ruby and RubyGems.
• Install Nokogiri
• Checkout the source code. Run git clone [email protected]/asqus/asqus.git. (Don't use eclipse because it will forget it checked out the source for you.) We put in a directory called 'asqus'.

• Create database.yml file in config (copy the config/database.yml.sample)
• You need to create a database, a user, and grant that user privileges to database.
• good instructions

• cd asqus
• bundle install
• bundle update

• asqus> rake db:create
• asqus> rake db:migrate
• asqus> rake db:seed
• cd db
• asqus/db> ./import-officials (first edit this file with the correct database name & user) (warning: can take 10 minutes or so to run)
• asqus/db> bundle exec rails runner "eval(File.read 'db/populate-congress-photos.rb')"

• obtain a /config/private/config.yml file

• installing ruby, and ruby-dev
• %> sudo apt-get/yum install ruby ruby-dev libpq-dev build-essential

This program is provided under an MIT open source license.