Planck-O-Mat

The open-source, self-hostable tool that helps citizens match their views to political parties in any simulated election or state.

NOTE: The current language is entirely German and we haven't bothered with adding i18n yet. If you do find yourself translating it we would be greatful for a Pull Request!

Screenshots

Main Page

Answer Mode

Result

All Parties

All Thesis Answers

Light Mode

Deploying

Building site source

PNPM

To build the Planck-O-Mat with PNPM simply run pnpm run build and you should find the built files in build.

Docker

If you don't have PNPM installed on a host, you may use the provided Docker file. Make sure to have Docker installed and then simply run the provided build_with_docker.sh file. You might have to provide it with executing permission with chmod +x build_with_docker.sh.

Docker will build the image, build the site, copy the built files into the dist directory and finally delete the image leaving no trace.

Next steps

Now copy the files either from the build or the dist directory into your web root. If your host is configured correctly to serve the web root, you should now see an unconfigured Planck-O-Mat instance.

Configuring

All configuration is done through the data.json file which you have to create in the web root as well. There is a data.json.example, let's look at that.

{
    "parties": [
        {
            "name": "Partei 1",
            "description": "Wir stehen für Chancengleichheit und Freiheit.",
            "positions": [1],
            "explanations": [
                "Umweltschutz ist essentiell, um unsere Heimat, die Erde, zu schützen. Mülltrennung und Recycling sind daher extrem wichtig. Durch Subventionen sichern wir das Unternehmen diese auch umsetzen."
            ],
            "program_link": "/program/Partei1 Wahlprogramm.pdf",
            "logo_link": "/logo/Partei1 Logo.png",
            "logo_link_dark": "/logo/Partei1 Logo Black.png"
        }
    ],
    "theses": [
        {   
            "topic": "Mülltrennung",
            "description": "Der Staat soll sich für Mülltrennung bzw. Müllvermeidung einsetzten und ggf. auch attraktiver machen."
        }
    ]
}

The parties array contains all parties within the system. Each party has the following properties:

• name
• description
• positions: An array of the party's positions. 1 means approval, -1 means opposition and 0 means neutral. The first element in the array corresponds with the first thesis, the second element with the second thesis and so on. The order matters!
• explanations: All the explanations for each decision. Again, the first explanation is for the first thesis.
• program_link: The link to the election program. As it will simply open that link, PDFs are recommended.
• logo_link: The party logo to show in light mode.
• logo_link_dark: The party logo to show in dark mode. They may be the same file.

The theses array contains all theses each party answered. Each contains:

• topic: A general thesis heading.
• description: The detailed description.

AGAIN: Order matters! The first thesis corresponds with the first answer and first explanation of each party.

Troubleshooting

Make sure that your JSON file is formatted properly! Otherwise it will fail to load. Also try to access the file directly via https://example.com/data.json and check if it is accessible.

Done

You should now have a running Planck-O-Mat instance populated with all parties. Have fun and don't forget to star this repository!