As part of the Open Government Directive, each of the major federal
agencies is required to seek input from the public for an Open
Government Plan. This consultation process is taking place February 6
- March 19, 2010, using a platform called IdeaScale. Each agency has
it's own, isolated IdeaScale site.

Basic stats are available for each agency separately, but there is
nowhere to easily compare participation across the agencies, nor for
those interested in participating to get a broad overview of the
activities. 

This is a stateless (for now) dashboard showing stats and comparisons
regarding activity on each agency's brainstorming site, using the
basic API made available by IdeaScale (thanks!).

Dependencies:
* tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/)
* mongodb
* pymongo (python module to interact with mongodb)
* json or simplejson

To Run:
* add a line like so in /etc/crontab
  00,30 * * * * username /path/to/govtracker_cron.py
  which updates the data in the database every 30 minutes.
* run dashboard.py

govtracker_cron.py populates the mongo database. Each time the data is
updated, a new mongo collection (which is like a table) is
created. The name of each collection is a timestamp representing the
time of the update. Each collection/update stores 1 document for each
idea, plus a document representing aggregate stats per agency, and a
document representing top ideas per agency, at the time of that
update. Thus if there are n total ideas across all agencies, the
collection will have n+2 documents. Initial population can take a few
minutes.

each idea object looks roughly like this:
{
 '_id':   	 ideascale idea ID,
 'category': 	 nominal category name,
 'agency' : 	 agency,
 'idea':  	 ideascale idea object
}

mongodb does not allow keys to have periods or dollar signs in
them. consequently, the cronjob encodes all periods as four percent
signs, and decodes them before display in the application.

dashboard.py, the main application, pulls its data from the database.