UnderTheInfluence is a web application developed to help track the influence of lobbying in politics.

We use data from:

• ParlParse (MPs’ interests; politician metadata)
• The Electoral Commission (registered donations)
• data.parliament (Lords’ interests)
• gov.uk (ministerial meetings)
• APPC (register of lobbyists)
• EveryPolitician (MP metadata)
• TheyWorkForYou (politician metadata)
• Companies House (company metadata)
• Powerbase (company and politician biographies)

We don’t currently import from wikidata (only indirectly via EveryPolitician) but we should because it’s brilliant.

This project is built in Django 1.8 and uses Wagtail CMS, Django REST Framework and other cool open source products.

UnderTheInfluence requires:

• python 3.4
• npm
• node.js
• bower
• elasticsearch

• Fetch this repo and all submodules

  git clone --recursive https://github.com/spudmind/undertheinfluence.git
  

• Install the required python packages

  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Copy the example config; update it as required

  cp conf/general.example.yml conf/general.yml
  

• Fetch javascript dependencies with bower

  python manage.py bower_install
  

• Migrate the database

  python manage.py migrate
  

This is a manual process at the moment :( Check the various management commands in datafetch/management/commands. Roughly you should run:

python manage.py import_parlparse --since 2010

python manage.py import_ministers --since 2010

# this is slow because it downloads lots of big images
python manage.py import_everypolitician

# electoral commission data
python manage.py import_ec

# current APPC register
python manage.py import_appc

python manage.py runserver

See: http://github.com/spudmind/uti-deploy