Introducing Process & Technology

Open Democracy Manitoba (ODM) is a community organization that builds online election resources with the goal of fostering government accountability, transparency and public education. I helped found ODM back in the summer of 2010 while we were building the WinnipegElection.ca website. The following year we built ManitobaElection.ca. These sites have helped over 75,000 voters research their candidates and learn about their local democratic process.

The name of this blog is Process and Technology. It’s goal is to document the technologies and processes used to build and maintain our websites.

This fall there will be a civic election in Winnipeg. As such, we have started rebuilding the WinnipegElection.ca (WE) website from the ground up. The original WE site was built using Ruby on Rails 2.3 and was hosted on an Ubuntu 8.04 server using Apache, Phusion Passenger, and MySQL. The upcoming version will be powered by Rails 4.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Nginx, Phusion Passenger and PostgreSQL.

We’ve got lots of new features planned. I am especially excited to implement election-versioning to allow us to archive electoral races. If you want to follow along, plug the RSS feed into your favourite feed reader. You can also follow me (@stungeye) or @WpgElection on Twitter. Comments are welcome (link below).

P.S. This blog was built using Poole and Jekyll following Joshua Lande’s tutorial. Blog entries are written in Markdown. The blog is hosted on Github Pages.