Civic Tech Field Guide Directory

The Civic Tech Field Guide is the world's biggest collection of projects using tech for the common good.

General

We use the Code for All #civic-tech-field-guide Slack channel for project coordination and discussion.
If you want to help out, you should join the Slack community and the channel and say hi.

All contributions are welcome. If you found a bug and want to provide a fix, fork the repo, work on the fix and create a PR.

If you wish to contribute a feature or provide general support, contact Matt Stempeck, among many things, the Curator of the project, to fill you in on the project's priorities.
Benjamin Munyoki is the project's main developer; you should ask him to review your work.

Get started

The Directory is based on Laravel 7.
If you are not familiar with it, first check out their docs to understand the basic concepts and the requirements to run it locally.

The source of truth is an Airtable database.
When listing projects or filtering them, instead of directly querying Airtable, we use a regularly synced SQL database.
The sync is one-directional; the SQL database is read-only.

Setting up the site locally

1. Clone the forked repo (git clone) and run the Composer install (composer install) command.
2. Create a .env file based (cp .env.example .env) on the .env.example and fill out the details.
3. Generate a key (php artisan key:generate) then run the migration (php artisan migrate) command.

At this point, the Directory should be functional, although there won't be any project in the database.

Importing the database

If you don't yet have access to the Airtable database, you can import the SQL by requesting the database dump in the Slack channel. The dump which will be sent to you privately.

If you have access to the Airtable database and provided the AIRTABLE_KEY and AIRTABLE_BASE values in the .env file, run the php artisan sync:tables command.

Other ways to contribute

You don't have to be a developer to contribute. Check out our Contribute page to find details about all the ways you can help us.

License

This guide and directory are free to use, re-use, adapt, and modify for non-commercial purposes as long as you link back with attribution, and share alike with the same license.