Consensus

Imagine a Google Moderator that didn't make you tear your hair out. That's Consensus.

What's that when it's at home?

Consensus is a tool for counting votes on topics proposed by its users. Topics are grouped into "agendas", which are lists of things to consider at meeting. Any Consensus user can create an agenda. Any Consensus user can propose a topic for any agenda. Votes are private only in the sense that they're not exposed by default in the UI, though you could show them if you wanted.

Here's a quick demo movie showing what it does.

Use it anywhere where you'd like a medium-sized group of people to vote on things regularly.

Features

• automatic account provisioning & signin via Mozilla Persona
• anyone can set up an agenda aka meeting
• anyone can add topics to an agenda
• everyone can vote on those topics
• markdown formatting for everything with a description
• presentation mode for meetings courtesy of Reveal.js

Operational requirements

Consensus stores its data in a set of leveldb databases, which are saved on disk. You'll wish to have sufficient fast disk to support your expected use. For small, less-active installations, just about anything will do. You'll also want to back those files up if the data Consensus stores is valuable to you.

Consensus makes no attempt to restrict access to the data or to account creation. If you have access to the site, you can create an account using Mozilla Persona. It is intended to be used behind a firewall. Note that it must be able to make outgoing connections at least to verifier.login.persona.org:443 to verify user identities.

Installing

Clone the repo or npm install consensus. Copy the sample config file in config.js.sample to config.js and edit to your satisfaction.

{
	"port":    3000, // may be overridden by setting PORT env var
	"dbpath":  "/var/db/consensus",
	"logging": 
	{
		"path": "/var/log/consensus",
		"console": false
	},
	"secrets": ["your cookie secret passphrase thingie", "which get passed to keygrip" ]
}

You may also pass in the location of the config file using the CONFIG_FILE environment variable.

Then start the app: npm start.

Customizing

The CSS framework is Bootstrap 3.0. You should be able to drop in any Bootstrap theme or customized CSS to style the app your way.

API

A few json endpoints are implemented. Eventually there will be more in support of whatever in-browser interactivity I need.

Hat-tips

This project was greatly enhanced by the following open-source projects:

• levelup
• express.js
• Reveal.js
• Bootstrap
• The League of Moveable Type
• Font Awesome

TODO before ship

• show winning topics more clearly
• implement delete account
• implement an API
• make it a js in-page app