Learning happens everywhere in the city—in libraries, parks, museums and cultural institutions, community-based organizations, colleges and universities, schools, and beyond. This summer, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is challenging all Chicago youth to participate in the Summer of Learning, a citywide effort to engage youth in hands-on learning opportunities—particularly in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. School stops for the summer, but learning never should.
More than 100 organizations across the city have joined forces to integrate learning into summer activities for youth of all ages in every Chicago neighborhood.
*This is the code that makes all that possible*
## Overview
The CSOL site depends on two backend services, [OpenBadger](http://github.com/mozilla/openbadger) to issue the badges and [Aestimia](http://github.com/mozilla/aestimia) to assess online learning. All three applications are written in Node.js and use Express as a web framework. CSOL uses MySQL as a data store, while OpenBadger and Aestimia use Mongoose. We also use the really excellent [Mandrill](http://mandrillapp.com) to send emails via their API, and Amazon S3 to host uploaded work.
Each app is developed with Heroku's [12 factor app](http://www.12factor.net/) structure in mind. The entire environment is hosted on Amazon EC2, but is highly portable.
## Get Involved
There's a lot of organizations involved with launching the Chicago Summer of Learning, the Chicago Mayor's Office, the MacArthur Foundation, the Digital Youth Network and the Mozilla Foundation, plus 100+ organizations offering youth opportunities to learn this summer.
Our code is open source, because we want this to be a community driven project. If you're interested in the goals of this project - we'd love your contributions.
Contributing is relatively easy,
1. Set up a development environment. Each app is Node.js, so if you're familiar with the firing up a Node app, you're in good shape. All configuration is passed to the app via environment variables, see below for how to define your environment.
2. Fork the code.
3. Find an issue to work on. We're actively marking issues that should be easy to grab as a first or second ticket as [onboarding](https://github.com/mozilla/csol-site/issues?labels=onboard&state=open).
4. Work on the issue in your fork. Be sure to write tests for any new code!
5. When you're done, make sure all tests pass, submit the code as a pull request to the main repository (master branch). We'll review it and merge it asap!
If you want to tackle a bigger ticket, find a core developer and ask them what to work on. We hang out in IRC at irc.mozilla.org in the #badges room. Core devs include cmcavoy, arhayward, mlarsson, atul and brianloveswords. Any of those irc folks will be able to direct you towards meatier issues.
If you're working on a ticket that needs copy, it's most likely in this [google doc](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UJ1X5mMpFnleNeh58VALNLf7y1P2kuJIsQOqI7vSUWE/edit#) but if not, ping @threeqube in IRC, or through an issue.
These variables should be configured in your applications environment through env variables. An easy way to do that is create a config.env in your application directly that looks something like,
