Web watcher. As developed service
March 4, 2012 was just a crazy day for all of us. For us — not only Russian citizens, but the authors of the service the Web-observer. Now, when we went away a little bit from all of the madness of past days, I want to tell you about how we wrote the service, what they have learned and whether we are going to stop.
It started with protests, which were triggered by the results of the Duma elections. I (Alexei Poimal), and another couple of guys — Nastya Demina ademina, Arsen Kazibekov ArKaz and Olga Suvorova for a couple of hours to create a page helpwall.info hyped it through social networks, gathered volunteers who were ready to help in distress the protesters, but fortunately our work was unclaimed — rallies were held peacefully and without incident. But to stop there is not wanted and luckily came across a post Ilya Segalovich iseg in which among various ideas I've got the idea of creating an electronic diary of the observer at the elections. Having thrown the idea to a feed in Facebook, I waited for feedback from my friends and the guys responded fast enough. The project was included Arsen Kazibekov, Timothy Flowers 2kan, Dima and Ilya Maletin Obshadko, and later — Sergei nebol'sin, Anastasia Demina, Tanya misyutina, Alex Efimov, Sergei Eroshenko, Konstantin Baev, Kohl Seskin, Anton Bondarev and Alex Trofimenko. Also the invaluable help of Andrey Buzin and Gregory Melkonyants from the Voice.
In the beginning we started work on two areas -video surveillance and mobile app for observers, but rapidly realized that makes no sense to be sprayed and focused only on the mobile app. Initially it was proposed to implement the following functionality:
— data collection on violations
— filing of complaints + the provision of data lawyers
— tracking the status of prosecutions of violators
But limited resources — human and time forced us to restrict the first item, and all the rest implement by a residual principle. Agreed that the source code will be available to everyone and he was placed in repository on github.
At the same time we watched the developments of other groups. The developers of one of them (won't name which one) actually suggested we turn the development of your mobile app and modify the server part under them, but confident in his strength, we refused and for good reason — in contrast to our development of their app and could not work properly :) Another group of developers was invited to our project in the early stages, refused, but later joined us and helped with the final testing of the Android version of the app (they have a difficulty with the server development).
Approaching election day and we all worked on the project very hard forces. We understand that there is a risk something to newspath and focused on the main thing — to collect as much information as possible, and rendering to do later. The last days we slept for a few hours, one of the team members fell with the temperature before March 4, but overcame himself was able to gather forces and return to the project.
On election day, Arsen Kazibekov, Anastasia Demin, Konstantin Baev and Ilya Segalovich worked as election observers, and I, Timothy Tsvetkov, Sergei nebol'sin, Alex Efimov, Anton Bondarev, Alexey Trofimenko and Kohl Seskin provided the application on the server and append the missing pieces of code. We parted at 4 am wildly tired.
The result of our work was the following:
— we provided observers with checklista violations
— gathered statistics of violations
— collected pictures of the final protocols that were submitted to all stakeholders — the voice of the Elephant, Grocon and others.
You can familiarize yourself with statistics and the final Protocol.
Maybe not everything was perfect, but it is impossible to demand the ideal from a brand-new type of applications, which was created in a short time a small team of experts.
We are currently negotiating with the Ukrainian and Moldovan colleagues, in front of which there will soon be a question of the organization for election observation.
But who participated in the development of
Coordination of the project — Alexey Poimal (Progress) and Ilya Segalovich (Map)
ServerSide — Timothy Flowers (Evil Martians), Sergei nebol'sin(Prophotos), Alexey Trofimenko (Eviterra), Nikolai Seskin (Evrone)
Frontend — Konstantin Baev, Sergey Eroshenko
Design, UI — Tatiana misyutina(Evil Martians), Anton Bondarev(Evrone)
Mobile — Ilya Obshadko XMP (soft), Dmitry Valetin (R Style), Alexey Efimov (Map)
PR — Anastasia Demina (Digital October), Arsen Kazibekov (Smart Wall and Krona Mobile)
Special thanks to all who participated in testing — Evgeny Danilov aradan other experts.
Well, some links on the subject:
The website of the Observer — webnabludatel.org
A New article in the Newspaper — www.novayagazeta.ru/news/54190.html
An article in RIA Novosti — www.ria.ru/vybor2012_hod_vyborov/20120214/565765738.html
An article in Digit — www.digit.ru/technology/20120214/389252760.html
An article in the Financial Times — blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/03/02/russia-apping-the-elections
Interview with Alexei Poimala and Ilya Segalovich on "Rain" — tvrain.ru/teleshow/govorite_s_toney_samsonovoy/sozdateli_veb_nablyudatelya_o_svoem_proekte-180292
Alena Popova and Alexei Poimal about — alenapopova.ru/egov/webnabludatel-org-ili-elektronnyj-dnevnik-nablyudatelya.html
Presentation of Alexei at the conference Mobifest 2012 — www.slideshare.net/alexeypoimtsev/mobi-fest-2012-presentation
Discussion of the project in ror2ru community — groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/ror2ru/35t9exGbvW0
If you have any questions — please ask and I will gladly try to answer them.
UPD 0: to save money we shut down the server, which spun applicative part. Statistical information and photos of the final protocols available, personal records are now available. In any case, we did a dump of the database and file system, so if you need all the data can be provided upon request.
UPD 1: Forgot to mention that due to the large number of models of Android phones we have no opportunity to test the application on all devices. We noticed that some devices send incorrect data — for example Timothy Flowers noticed that some devices were sending messages with the status in the distant future and wrote a rake task to fix this, but it is also possible other errors.
UPD 2: "Web-observer" was nominated for the Best technological project for the benefit of society within the framework of the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards. If you like the project — you can vote for it here thebobs.com/russian/category/2012/best-use-of-technology-for-social-good-2012
UPD 3 - During development we used the following tools
server Ubuntu 10.4 on AWS
— DB — PostgreSQL
server applications — Ruby on Rails 3.2.1 + Unicorn + Nginx
— IDE — RubyMine, Xcode, Eclipse,
— Operating systems — mainly OSX Lion on a 15" MBP :)))
— Team work (tasks + discussion) — BaseCamp
— Source code — github
— Tasks developers PivotalTracker (little) + Github Issues + BaseCamp + Skype + email + phone + personal communication
— Drinking coffee while counting popped up, except fully understand the meaning of can't, but something about that too much :)
Article based on information from habrahabr.ru
It started with protests, which were triggered by the results of the Duma elections. I (Alexei Poimal), and another couple of guys — Nastya Demina ademina, Arsen Kazibekov ArKaz and Olga Suvorova for a couple of hours to create a page helpwall.info hyped it through social networks, gathered volunteers who were ready to help in distress the protesters, but fortunately our work was unclaimed — rallies were held peacefully and without incident. But to stop there is not wanted and luckily came across a post Ilya Segalovich iseg in which among various ideas I've got the idea of creating an electronic diary of the observer at the elections. Having thrown the idea to a feed in Facebook, I waited for feedback from my friends and the guys responded fast enough. The project was included Arsen Kazibekov, Timothy Flowers 2kan, Dima and Ilya Maletin Obshadko, and later — Sergei nebol'sin, Anastasia Demina, Tanya misyutina, Alex Efimov, Sergei Eroshenko, Konstantin Baev, Kohl Seskin, Anton Bondarev and Alex Trofimenko. Also the invaluable help of Andrey Buzin and Gregory Melkonyants from the Voice.
In the beginning we started work on two areas -video surveillance and mobile app for observers, but rapidly realized that makes no sense to be sprayed and focused only on the mobile app. Initially it was proposed to implement the following functionality:
— data collection on violations
— filing of complaints + the provision of data lawyers
— tracking the status of prosecutions of violators
But limited resources — human and time forced us to restrict the first item, and all the rest implement by a residual principle. Agreed that the source code will be available to everyone and he was placed in repository on github.
At the same time we watched the developments of other groups. The developers of one of them (won't name which one) actually suggested we turn the development of your mobile app and modify the server part under them, but confident in his strength, we refused and for good reason — in contrast to our development of their app and could not work properly :) Another group of developers was invited to our project in the early stages, refused, but later joined us and helped with the final testing of the Android version of the app (they have a difficulty with the server development).
Approaching election day and we all worked on the project very hard forces. We understand that there is a risk something to newspath and focused on the main thing — to collect as much information as possible, and rendering to do later. The last days we slept for a few hours, one of the team members fell with the temperature before March 4, but overcame himself was able to gather forces and return to the project.
On election day, Arsen Kazibekov, Anastasia Demin, Konstantin Baev and Ilya Segalovich worked as election observers, and I, Timothy Tsvetkov, Sergei nebol'sin, Alex Efimov, Anton Bondarev, Alexey Trofimenko and Kohl Seskin provided the application on the server and append the missing pieces of code. We parted at 4 am wildly tired.
The result of our work was the following:
— we provided observers with checklista violations
— gathered statistics of violations
— collected pictures of the final protocols that were submitted to all stakeholders — the voice of the Elephant, Grocon and others.
You can familiarize yourself with statistics and the final Protocol.
Maybe not everything was perfect, but it is impossible to demand the ideal from a brand-new type of applications, which was created in a short time a small team of experts.
We are currently negotiating with the Ukrainian and Moldovan colleagues, in front of which there will soon be a question of the organization for election observation.
But who participated in the development of
Coordination of the project — Alexey Poimal (Progress) and Ilya Segalovich (Map)
ServerSide — Timothy Flowers (Evil Martians), Sergei nebol'sin(Prophotos), Alexey Trofimenko (Eviterra), Nikolai Seskin (Evrone)
Frontend — Konstantin Baev, Sergey Eroshenko
Design, UI — Tatiana misyutina(Evil Martians), Anton Bondarev(Evrone)
Mobile — Ilya Obshadko XMP (soft), Dmitry Valetin (R Style), Alexey Efimov (Map)
PR — Anastasia Demina (Digital October), Arsen Kazibekov (Smart Wall and Krona Mobile)
Special thanks to all who participated in testing — Evgeny Danilov aradan other experts.
Well, some links on the subject:
The website of the Observer — webnabludatel.org
A New article in the Newspaper — www.novayagazeta.ru/news/54190.html
An article in RIA Novosti — www.ria.ru/vybor2012_hod_vyborov/20120214/565765738.html
An article in Digit — www.digit.ru/technology/20120214/389252760.html
An article in the Financial Times — blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/03/02/russia-apping-the-elections
Interview with Alexei Poimala and Ilya Segalovich on "Rain" — tvrain.ru/teleshow/govorite_s_toney_samsonovoy/sozdateli_veb_nablyudatelya_o_svoem_proekte-180292
Alena Popova and Alexei Poimal about — alenapopova.ru/egov/webnabludatel-org-ili-elektronnyj-dnevnik-nablyudatelya.html
Presentation of Alexei at the conference Mobifest 2012 — www.slideshare.net/alexeypoimtsev/mobi-fest-2012-presentation
Discussion of the project in ror2ru community — groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/ror2ru/35t9exGbvW0
If you have any questions — please ask and I will gladly try to answer them.
UPD 0: to save money we shut down the server, which spun applicative part. Statistical information and photos of the final protocols available, personal records are now available. In any case, we did a dump of the database and file system, so if you need all the data can be provided upon request.
UPD 1: Forgot to mention that due to the large number of models of Android phones we have no opportunity to test the application on all devices. We noticed that some devices send incorrect data — for example Timothy Flowers noticed that some devices were sending messages with the status in the distant future and wrote a rake task to fix this, but it is also possible other errors.
UPD 2: "Web-observer" was nominated for the Best technological project for the benefit of society within the framework of the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards. If you like the project — you can vote for it here thebobs.com/russian/category/2012/best-use-of-technology-for-social-good-2012
UPD 3 - During development we used the following tools
server Ubuntu 10.4 on AWS
— DB — PostgreSQL
server applications — Ruby on Rails 3.2.1 + Unicorn + Nginx
— IDE — RubyMine, Xcode, Eclipse,
— Operating systems — mainly OSX Lion on a 15" MBP :)))
— Team work (tasks + discussion) — BaseCamp
— Source code — github
— Tasks developers PivotalTracker (little) + Github Issues + BaseCamp + Skype + email + phone + personal communication
— Drinking coffee while counting popped up, except fully understand the meaning of can't, but something about that too much :)
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