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alternate identity social media platform
(Original working title: Portrait Domain)
This is a concept for an gamified social media platform / art installation aiming to explore alternate identity, reflect on the usurping of privacy through facial recognition technology, and make use of historic digitized photographs in the Public Domain to recreate personas from the past. Since the #glamhack event where this project started, we have developed an offline installation which uses Augmented Reality to explore the portraits. See videos on Twitter or Instagram.
View the concept document for a full description.
Data
The exhibit gathers data on user interactions with historical portraits, which is combined with analytics from the web application on the Logentries platform:
Team
Launched by loleg at the hackdays, this project has already had over a dozen collaborators and advisors who have kindly shared time and expertise in support. Thank you all!
Please also see the closely related projects picturethis and graphingthestateless.
Portrait Domain
This is a project demo developed for the OpenGLAM.ch Hackathon in Berne, Switzerland on February 27-28, 2015. For background information see the wiki page (make.opendata.ch).
Stack
| Tool | Name | Advantage |
|---|---|---|
| Server distro | Ubuntu 14.10 x64 | Latest Linux |
| WSGI proxy | Gunicorn | Manage workers automatically |
| Web proxy | Nginx | Fast and easy to configure |
| Framework | Flask | Single file approach for MVC |
| Data store | MongoDB | No scheme needed and scalable |
| DevOps | Fabric | Agentless and Pythonic |
In addition, a Supervisor running on the server provides a daemon to protect the Gunicorn-Flask process.
Developer setup
Based on the MiniTwit application, which is a prototype of Twitter like multiple-user social network. The original application depends on SQLite. However, we have focused on using MongoDB for this project.
To install, set up a config.py which can be just a blank file on your local machine.
(1) Make sure you have a current version of Python and Virtualenv, as well as XML libraries:
sudo apt-get install python virtualenv
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libz-dev
(2) Set up a virtual environment:
virtualenv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
(3) Run the server:
python minitwit.py
Deployment
1. Install Fabric and clone the Github repo
The DevOps tool is fabric that is simply based on SSH. The fabfile.py and the staging flask files are stored on Github. We should install fabric and download the fabfile.py on the local machine before the deployment.
bash
sudo pip install fabric
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dapangmao/minitwit-mongo-ubuntu/master/fabfile.py
fab -l
2. Input IP from the virtual machine
A new VM usually emails IP address and the root password. Then we could modify the head part of the fabfile.py accordingly. There are quite a few cheaper cloud provider for prototyping other than Amazon EC2. For example, a minimal instance from DigitalOcean only costs five dollars a month. If SSH key has been uploaded, the password could be ignored.
env.hosts = ['YOUR IP ADDRESS'] # <--------- Enter the IP address
env.user = 'root'
env.password = 'YOUR PASSWORD' # <--------- Enter the root password
3. Fire up Fabric
Now it is time to formally deploy the application. With the command below, the fabric will first install pip, git, nginx, gunicorn, supervisor and the latest MongodB, and configure them sequentially. In less than 5 minutes, a Flask and MongoDB application will be ready for use. Since DigitalOcean has its own software repository for Ubuntu, and its VMs are on SSD, the deployment is even faster, which is usually finished in one minute.
python
fab deploy_minitwit