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Overview

vcweb is a Django framework for developing group experiments, with a design bias towards collective action experiments (public goods, common pool resources). It provides data models and abstractions for configuring, collecting and managing experiment data and real-time server push via sockjs.

UI

The core vcweb app provides base templates with Bootstrap that can be used if you want to get an experiment up and running quickly. Existing vcweb experiments use KnockoutJS but we are migrating to Django Rest Framework to provide web APIs over the vcweb data model, consumed by ReactJS.

Data Model

NOTE: ongoing documentation / work in this area

Each experiment has one or more groups, and each group is comprised of a set of participants. Data for a given experiment is collected at the participant-group level with foreign keys to the participant generating the data, the round in which the data was generated, the group they belonged to in that round, the experiment the data was generated in, the data parameter and value that was generated, and creation and last modified timestamps. Round configuration metadata associated with a given round in the experiment maintains references to all configuration parameters associated with that specific round including that round's sequence number. RoundConfiguration metadata belong to an existing ExperimentConfiguration object representing a specific experimental treatment.

Current efforts

Areas of active development include:

• storing and managing graph data representing social network relationships that can affect information flow
• improving the data value API (participant and group data, experiment and round parameterizations) and web API via Django Rest Framework integration
• investigate django channels as a replacement for sockjs-tornado and redis
• Dockerized deployment
• refactor core data models before 1.0 release (rename ExperimentMetadata -> Experiment, Experiment -> ExperimentRun for example)

Running experiments

Please visit our Features page for some screenshots of vcweb features.

If you would like experimenter access to run trial experiments, please contact us.

Experiments in production

• Lighter Footprints
• Forestry
• Boundary Effects

Experiments in development

• Forestry treatment for Daniel DeCaro
• Irrigation

Technology stack

• Python 2.7 or later
• PostgreSQL
• Django 1.9
• Fabric for build management & deployment
• sockjs and sockjs-tornado and Redis for server push

See [our developer docs](Developer Documentation) for more details on local development setup.