Ting — Parent Advocacy Pilot

From Old Norse þing — the open-air assemblies of early medieval Scandinavia where free people gathered to debate and decide. The most famous is Iceland's Althing (Alþingi), established 930 CE, one of the oldest continuously functioning legislative bodies in the world.

Ting is a structured-input parent-advocacy site for one school's worth of families. It channels the energy that already shows up at PTA and Board of Education meetings into a form the board (and everyone else) can read on one page.

• Anonymous but verified — every voter has a code from a sealed envelope, never an account; no IPs, no emails, no PII
• Forced prioritization — ranking, NPS, agreement scales; no "everything is important"
• Public aggregate — survey results live at /summary for anyone to read; no entry can be traced back to an envelope or a person

Quickstart (dev tier — no k8s needed)

Requires Docker + Python 3.12+. All commands run from this directory (components/ting/). The ./scripts/ting wrapper targets the dev tier — a Postgres + Valkey running locally via docker-compose. It's a different database than any k8s deploy.

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d                # postgres + valkey in containers

python3.12 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'

./scripts/ting migrate
./scripts/ting seed seeds/example.yaml
./scripts/ting demo populate --cohort MPE-2026-spring-pilot --count 30
./scripts/ting dev

Open http://localhost:8000. Generate a code to log in:

./scripts/ting codes generate --cohort MPE-2026-spring-pilot --count 1

Adding codes to an already-running k8s deploy

If you're testing against the local k8s tier (k3d at ting.local), codes live in the in-cluster Postgres — not the dev-tier docker-compose DB. Use make codes (or kubectl exec) instead:

make codes                        # 3 codes; override with COHORT=... DEMO_COUNT=...

# or explicitly:
kubectl --context k3d-nordri-test exec -n ting-local deploy/ting \
  -- ting codes generate --cohort MPE-2026-spring-pilot --count 5

For the GKE tiers (cmdbee, frontstate) substitute the appropriate kubectl context and namespace. See docs/cli.md for the full operator reference.

Other deploy tiers

Tier	Where	Hostname
dev	Docker only, no k8s	localhost:8000
localk8s	k3d / Rancher Desktop with Mimir	ting.local
cmdbee	GKE staging	ting.cmdbee.org
frontstate	GKE production	ting.frontstate.org

See docs/deployment.md for the full walkthrough including Mimir Crossplane claims and the ting-secrets Secret shape.

Developer docs

• docs/ — start with docs/index.md
• docs/cli.md — every ting subcommand with examples
• docs/development.md — local dev, Make targets, ws CLI, editing the data model
• docs/deployment.md — the four tiers, Mimir, GHCR
• docs/data-model.md — schema tour, privacy guarantees, aggregation semantics

Upstream in the workspace:

• Design doc — the why and the tradeoffs
• Implementation plan — the how

Testing

ws test ting           # = pytest tests/unit tests/integration -v
ws lint ting           # = ruff check src/ tests/

Or make test / make lint from inside components/ting/.

Contributing

Use ws commit (never raw git add/git commit) — see docs/development.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.