Govdirectory

Website repository for Govdirectory - a crowdsourced and fact-checked directory of official governmental online accounts and services.

Govdirectory aims to become a global directory of government agencies and their online presence by utilizing Wikidata. Wikidata's community, sourceability, versioning, and potential custom tooling that we create will ensure that not only should the information be correct but when it isn't, because of vandalism or something else, users will be able, and suggested, to validate the information. The goal is for this directory to be useful to journalists, web-archivists, researchers and many others, certainly including regular citizens.

Development setup

Govdirectory is a static site meaning that it already has all of its pages generated when a visitor visits it. Govdirectory uses Snowman and SPARQL to do this.

Because each initial build of Snowman issues thousands (yes thousands) of SPARQL queries one should never make an initial build against query.wikidata.org but rather against a local Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) instance. However, because setting up a WDQS instance is not trivial, we provide a copy of a Snowman build cache directory. If in use, this will ensure Snowman only queries Wikidata when a query is updated.

[!TIP] Some of the most common development commands are available through Just, if you do not use just you can still look in the justfile for hints.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Snowman
• Optionally: A local WDQS instance

1. Clone the project:

shell git clone https://github.com/govdirectory/website

2. Get a recent build cache:

shell cd website git clone https://github.com/govdirectory/website-cache .snowman

3. Build the website and run the development server:

shell snowman build && snowman server

Advanced topics

• Setting up your own WDQS instance
• Snowman: Working with cache

Usage

Intended to be used through the website at govdirectory.org.

Maintainers

• Abbe98
• Ainali

For now, the maintainers have the final say in all matters, but we are taking all opinions from contributors into consideration. When the community grows, we are planning to shift to a governance model with shared responsibilities. Besides pinging us in issues, pull requests and discussions, you can also reach us on Mastodon where we are @ainali and @abbe98.

Acknowledgements

Unlock accelerator program

This project participated in the Unlock accelerator program program (original application).

During the accelerator, which ended in October 2021, we defined a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to: "As an MVP we want to create a working website where people can search, filter, and add data about Swedish and British public institutions and their social media accounts."

Specifically, we want to acknowledge all the help our coach Fabian Gampp gave to us. Besides general good mentorship, we wouldn't have had such a bold direction of the design of the website without him.

Matomo server

Wikimedia Sverige is graciously providing us with Matomo analytics. The dashboard has been made publicly accessible.

Contributing

We are looking for people like you to contribute to this project by suggesting improvements and helping develop it. Get started by reading our contributors guide.

Please note that this project is developed with a code of conduct. By participating in this project, you agree to abide by its terms. Please be lovely to all other community members.

License

This repository and all contributions made to it are licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication if not otherwise stated within a file or directory.