Help me tell PlanningAlerts who my local councillors are, so I can start asking them about planning proposals in PlanningAlerts

[equivalentideas]

The Ask Your Councillors option is only available for about 50 authorities, because we don't have councillors, or current councillors, for them.

Currently it's very hard for people to contribute information about who their local councillors are openaustralia/australian_local_councillors_popolo#98 (comment) .

https://github.com/openaustralia/australian_local_councillors_popolo is the data store and source of truth for information about Australian Local Councillors.

Following our project principles, we thought it made most sense for people to be able to contribute information without leaving PlanningAlerts. These contributions would be approved and then sent to the data store. PlanningAlerts then pulls the data back from there and runs some other processes so people can start writing to their councillors.

This issue is just about enabling people to contribute the data.

In scope

• add page for people to add one councillor for admins to review.
• the contributions get listed on an admin page
• admins can download/copy the councillor information to the google sheet to begin the existing contribution process.

This is a kind of wizard of oz approach to allow us to start building the hardest bit, the system that contributors will use.

Out of scope

• the contributor provides their details so the admin can contact them about their contribution and thank them.
• people make a contribution that includes a flexible number of suggested councillors.
• we don't have to add a link to this form anywhere on the site yet, that will be another issue
• the data does not have to get automatically sent to the data store https://github.com/openaustralia/australian_local_councillors_popolo . Admins do that manually for now.
• we don't have to create a public contributions page yet where people can see there pending contribution. That can be another issue.

[equivalentideas]

So the initial steps with this are:

• @equivalentideas to think a bit more and sketch out a simple form to start with
• @equivalentideas to create a new feature branch for this with one or more simple integration tests that describe what this should do
• @hisayohorie to work on implementing the new behavior (which will include pairing sessions)

[equivalentideas]

Thinking some more about how we can simplify this, I think the very first version people can only submit one councillor at a time. I think we'll want to enhance that so people can make one contribution with all the councillors to reduce steps and allow them to check them all more easily—but let's start with the simplest possible thing (this was @henare’s idea really 😉).

Also, we don't have to take people’s emails yet. We don't have any contributors that we don't know about so we don't have to introduce that immediately.

I'm going to reduce that scope above.

So the first version is:

1. I'm at a page for adding councillors for my council. I add the name and email for one councillor. I submit them.

2. The contribution is saved to the database and listed as a suggested councillor for an admin to copy it to the existing process.

[equivalentideas]

@equivalentideas to create a new feature branch for this with one or more simple integration tests that describe what this should do

Here's two integration tests that cover the stories described above:

1. I'm at a page for adding councillors for my council. I add the name and email for one councillor. I submit them.
2. The contribution is saved to the database and listed as a suggested councillor for an admin to copy it to the existing process.

We can work on these on the person_contributes_councillor_info feature branch. @hisayohorie we kick things off together tomorrow when I'm in, or if you feel like it get started 🚀

When we're happy with that, we can add a feature flag, merge it into master and deploy! Using the feature flag we can view the form on the staging server and have it completely switched off in production. That way we get to test it in the wild (not on our development machines) and also don't have to make it public till we're happy for people to see it 🍰

[equivalentideas]

@hisayohorie to work on implementing the new behavior (which will include pairing sessions)

@hisayohorie has implemented the in-scope parts of this 🎆 in #1174 and ea92d1a...9a277e7

We're now going to extract new issues from the out-of-scope section for the next steps and close this.

[equivalentideas]

We're moved this to a milestone https://github.com/openaustralia/planningalerts/milestone/7 closing