ROCK ME

ROCKME is an innovative MREL tool for the Monitoring, Reporting, Evaluation of the impacts of the outcomes of actions implemented within large scale EU demonstration projects, for the definition and management of their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and of the stakeholders, and for learning from the experience of such actions. It is used by city decision makers, city policy makers, leaders in private enterprises and in not-for-profit organisations to define KPIs and to monitor, report on, evaluate the impact of the outcome of actions from conception stage to implementation and finally to post implementation evaluation on the long term.

The tool was imagined, conceptualised and designed by Corrado Topi and Howard Cambridge at the Stockholm Environment Institute Research Centre at the University of York. The lead software developer was Guozhong “Douglas” Wang. Innes Anderson-Morrison migrated the solution to a python stack and David Gilles contributed to bug fixing. The tool was inspired by Outcome Mapping (originally developed by the International Development Research Centre or IDRC), and was developed as part of the EC funded large scale demonstrator project ROCK.

ROCK developed an innovative, collaborative and circular systemic approach for regeneration and adaptive reuse of historic city centres. Implementing a repertoire of successful heritage-led regeneration initiatives, ROCK test the replicability of the spatial approach and of successful models addressing the specific needs of historic city centres. The ROCK project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 730280.

See the official website about page for more details.

How to quote ROCKME

If you ever need to quote the tool in papers or reports the correct way of reporting is:

Topi, C., Cambridge, H., Wang, G. 2021, ROCKME: A monitoring reporting evaluation and learning tool for large scale EU demostration projects. Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York. York. UK. https://github.com/SEI-York/ROCKME-open-source/

Setting up a Development environment

Modify the .env.example file according to your environment and rename it to .env. Then place it in the root of the repository (next to manage.py).

Next, create your virtual environment and install the site dependencies:

$ make os_install  # OPTIONAL!: On Ubuntu this will install the required packages
                   #            for running DeCart locally. See scripts/os-depts.apt
                   #            for details if you need to do a manual install.
                   #            You DO NOT need to run this if you already have
                   #            python3.6 and Postgres installed.
$ make install

Next, set up the development database name and password. These are used by ROCK_ME to access the development database when working locally. To set up the database, first ensure that Postgres is installed (run make os_install if not), then type the following to get an interactive postgres shell:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ psql

Once you are at the psql prompt, run the following commands to set up the development database:

CREATE DATABASE <db name from .env>;
CREATE USER <username from .env> WITH PASSWORD '<password from .env>';
ALTER ROLE <username from .env> SET client_encoding TO 'utf8';
ALTER ROLE <username from .env> SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed';
ALTER ROLE <username from .env> SET timezone TO 'UTC';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <db name from .env> TO <username from .env>;

You should see a confirmation message following each command. If everything ran OK then you can exit using \q and then get back to your normal shell by typing exit.

Finally, you need to create your site superuser and initialise the dev database structure within Django:

$ cd <rock_me directory>
$ make migrations
$ make migrate
$ make superuser  # you will be prompted for details
$ make seed_db

From this point on, you should have a functional (but blank) database to work with.