Chris Hill-Scott 8ea3f0141c Give estimates of the number of phones in a broadcast area
We need to give people a better feel for the consequences of
broadcasting an alert. We’ve seen in research that some users will
assume it is subscription based, or opt-in, rather than going to every
phone in the area.

I reckon that the most effective way to communicate this is to put some
numbers next to the areas, to give people an idea of how many people
will get alerted.

We can estimate how many phones are in an area by:
- taking the population of all electoral wards in that area
- multiplying it by the percentage of people who own an internet
  connected phone[1]

The Office for National Statistics publish both these datasets.

The number of people who own an intenet connected phone varies a lot by
age. Since the population data for each ward is broken down by age we
can factor this in. Simplified, the calculation looks like this:
- take the _Abbey_ ward of _Barking and Dagenham_
- in this ward there are 26 people aged 80
- 40% of people over 65 have an internet-connected phone
- therefore 10 of these 80-year-olds would be likely to receive a
  broadcast
- (repeat for all other ages)

These numbers won’t be exact, but should be enough to give people a feel
for the severity of what they’re about to do. We can see if they acheive
this aim in user research.

1. This is a proxy for the number of people who are likely to have a 4G
   capable phone, because only 4G capable phones will be receiving
   broadcasts to begin with
2020-09-14 16:26:09 +01:00

notifications-admin

GOV.UK Notify admin application - https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/

Features of this application

  • Register and manage users
  • Create and manage services
  • Send batch emails and SMS by uploading a CSV
  • Show history of notifications

First-time setup

1. Install Homebrew

Install Homebrew, a package manager for OSX:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

2. Make sure you're using correct language versions

Languages needed

  • Python 3.6.x
  • Node 10.15.3 or greater
  • npm 6.4.1 or greater

Need to install node? Run:

brew install node

2.1. pyenv For Python version management

pyenv is a program to manage and swap between different versions of Python. To install:

brew install pyenv

And then follow the further installation instructions in https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation to configure it.

2.2. n For Node version management

NPM is Node's package management tool. n is a tool for managing different versions of Node. The following installs n and uses the long term support (LTS) version of Node.

npm install -g n
n lts

3. Install NPM dependencies

npm install
npm rebuild node-sass

4. Install and use virtualenvwrapper (optional)

We suggest using a virtualenv to separate the python dependencies for this project from python dependencies for other projects.

Install virtualenvwrapper:

pip install virtualenvwrapper

Then follow the virtualenvwrapper installation instructions docs to configure virtualenvwrapper for your terminal.

Set up your virtualenv:

mkvirtualenv notifications-admin

If you need to specify a certain version of python you can do this using -p, for example:

mkvirtualenv -p ~/.pyenv/versions/3.6.3/bin/python notifications-admin

Activate your virtualenv:

workon notifications-admin

5. Install Python dependencies

Install dependencies and build the frontend assets:

./scripts/bootstrap.sh

Note: You may need versions of both Python 3 and Python 2 accessible to build the python dependencies. pyenv is great for that, and making both Python versions accessible can be done like so:

pyenv global 3.6.3 2.7.15

6. Create a local environment.sh file

In the root directory of the application, run:

echo "
export NOTIFY_ENVIRONMENT='development'
export FLASK_APP=application.py
export FLASK_DEBUG=1
export WERKZEUG_DEBUG_PIN=off
"> environment.sh

7. AWS credentials

Your aws credentials should be stored in a folder located at ~/.aws. Follow Amazon's instructions for storing them correctly

8. Running the application

In the root directory of the application, run:

./scripts/run_app.sh

Then visit localhost:6012

Updating application dependencies

requirements.txt file is generated from the requirements-app.txt in order to pin versions of all nested dependencies. If requirements-app.txt has been changed (or we want to update the unpinned nested dependencies) requirements.txt should be regenerated with

make freeze-requirements

requirements.txt should be committed alongside requirements-app.txt changes.

Automatically rebuild the frontend assets

If you want the front end assets to re-compile on changes, leave this running in a separate terminal from the app

    npm run watch

Working with static assets

When running locally static assets are served by Flask at http://localhost:6012/static/…

When running on preview, staging and production theres a bit more to it:

notify-static-after

Description
The UI of Notify.gov
Readme 546 MiB
Languages
Python 69.3%
HTML 16.6%
JavaScript 11.1%
SCSS 0.9%
Nunjucks 0.7%
Other 1.4%