Casey Vaughan (Staff) Leverage: Philly Campaign Finance Update #5

Fall 17/ Winter 18

Leverage started a new sprint in the Fall of 2017 with a core group of developers made up of James Lott, Remi Adewale and Chris Williams. The initial API built in the Fall of 2016 during the City as a Service Hackathon was scrapped along with the existing front end built in AngularJS. As James Lott recalls, “we overhauled the data model and Chris already had a working code base that just needed to be written around the Philly data.”

An MVP was proposed for a sprint for with three pages to be completed. The first page will display Per Race Information such as total raised and top contributors. The second page will display information about All Candidates running in any one Race. So for each candidate you would see total raised and party affiliation. The third is a Candidate Detail page which displays information about funds raised by individual candidates. For example information such as funds raised inside of and outside of Philadelphia as well as inside and outside of Pennsylvania. Additionally we plan for the third page to show top contributors as well as contributions by zip code.

Leverage met consistently through the Fall of 2017 before lightning up the workload during the the holidays. Joining the team at this time was Constantine Sergeev who met the Leverage team at an open house event. Eamon Caddigan also stepped back into the ring to provide some veteran insight.

While the original MVP timeline was not met the team carried the momentum through the winter and into 2018. It was decided in the early spring of 2018 to extend the timeline for the MVP indefinitely and focus more effort on organizing the work and tasks that trying to control the pace. The technology stack is composed of Vanilla Javascript (ES6) and Bootstrap 4 on the front end and the API is built with Python 3, Flask and Alchemy.