We are building a website that saves privacy offices time by speeding up search and adding structure to System of Records Notices (SORNs) and helps the public understand what data the government collects about them.
SORN DASH is a public dashboard for finding information about the privacy impacts and protections of government IT systems. It is a ruby-on-rails application that processes System of Records Notices (SORNs) published in the Federal Register and stores them as structured records in a database. It enables search and exploration of these important privacy documents that inform the public about the existence and current state of government IT systems that collect and store personally-identifiable information (PII).
SORN DASH was created by 18F in collaboration with the Federal Privacy Council with funding from 10x.
SORN DASH is hosted and maintained by the TTS Identity Program Management Office.
SORN DASH has a simple technical stack - you need a computer with:
Make sure that postgresql is installed and running:
brew install postgresql brew services start postgresql
sudo apt install postgresql sudo service postgresql start
Use a ruby version manager to set the local SORN DASH directory to the ruby version found in the .ruby-version file. Finally -- install Ruby’s bundler
gem install bundler
and yarn
brew install node npm install --global yarn
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_17.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs npm install --global yarn
Now install the necessary project dependencies using:
bundle install
yarn install --check-files
Now that you have the environment set-up, create the database:
bundle exec rails db:create
Once this is complete, run all the migrations:
bundle exec rails db:migrate
Once this is complete, run the following command to fetch all the SORNs from the Federal Register API and populate your local database (this takes about an hour and a half the first time it is run, to download and populate the database):
bundle exec rails federal_register:find_sorns
You can now run SORN DASH locally using:
export RAILS_ENV=development
bundle exec rails server -e $RAILS_ENV
SORN DASH is now running locally on your computer!
Open a browser and go to https://localhost:3000/
Note: that in Chrome you may have to go into incognito in order to get around the SSL requirements.
Certain changes in the code will require you to run updates before being able to run SORN DASH locally again.
Changes to the schema will require a database migration before SORN DASH can be run. Run this with:
bundle exec rails db:migrate
Adding or updating the included gems will require you to update your ruby packages. Run this with:
bundle install
This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:
This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.