CMS Gardens very own Stephan Luckow (@luckow@luckow.org) explained the idea behind his project “Follow the money” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
What is your project called, and what is it all about?
Stephan:
What is the project called? Oh, fun fact, we renamed it because it’s so complex to remember.
Website, public website, transparency, funding, money, or something like that.
And we identified a really easy name, so we renamed it to Follow the Money.
And the idea is to scan all the public sector website URLs, here for the hackers on only cities from Germany, and to identify the CMS behind to get an idea where our tax money goes.
Simon:
What will your tool actually do? Like scan websites and then…
Stephan:
Project has a pipeline, a workflow pipeline or a technical pipeline.
Plan our domain sourcing relies on wikidata so we documented the queries which we which we throw against the api of wikidata and then sourced urls from different categories here for the hackathon with the country id germany and the urls are thrown against another api from a tim’s product It’s called versionmanager.io and versionmanager detects the TMS and also the IP address and makes a screenshot.
Stephan:
It’s possible to detect the version of the CMS. And then the JSON file is thrown against headless CMS called Directus.
And inside directors, we created a data structure to connect a front-end client API against the Directus API.
So on our website, follow-the-money.org, follow minus the minus money.
Oh, I have to learn.
Stephan:
Yep, so if you open the website in the browser, you’ll see our first crawl from last night.
We detected nearly 50% of nearly 1,000 URLs.
Stephan:
And our task for the morning today is to get an idea if it’s static content or is this headless CMS.
The version manager has to learn something about special German CMS like CMS Fiona or Webplication or ICIS.
So there are a few crazy, looks like not open source software.
So maybe we have to train the version manager to detect them.
So the goal of all of the money is to have a solid pipeline in the first step with maybe all the URLs from Germany, from the public sector.
But after that, we want to open up the whole pipeline and offer them to our friends from the European country.
So um i’m totally interested in comparing cms in france to italy uh to that might be interesting yeah then let’s see if maybe italy is a ploneland i have no clue from what i’ve learned today from our first um first sample of uls is germany is a type of three country so especially for our our first batch of city uls but it’s okay we are cms garden and we are kind of switzerland so we are totally unbiased and um yeah let’s see in maybe three months what we can tell you as an interested person about the landscape in germany will.
Simon:
Your site also tracks changes over time? Because that might also be interesting to have like a snapshot in time from 2024 and in two or three years see like now….
Stephan:
Sorry to interrupt, you our plan is to have a cron job on a quarterly base so every quarter is a snapshot interesting.
Simon:
Okay i guess that is it thank you thank you for taking the time good luck with the rest of the hackathon.
Stephan:
Oh you mean the next 20 minutes? okay yes yes thank you thank you.