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
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
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 there’s a bit more to it:
