FCC Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) Comment Submitter

The FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) provides mechanisms for citizens and organizations to provide public input to the FCC. This Ruby script automates the process of posting public comments collected through the stori_es user generated content management system into the FCC’s Express filing interface.

How It Works

This script uses the stori_es API to:

1. Retrieve Stories which have been gathered into a specified Collection in a stori_es instance
2. Transforms each Story into the comment format required by the FCC
3. Uses the Mechanize gem to submit each Story as a comment to the FCC’s ECFS Express interface
4. Markup the Story with information returned by the FCC

Requirements

This script utilizes the following Ruby gems:

• rest-client
• json
• mechanize

You can use Bundler to install the gems specified in the project gemfile.

Status

This script should be regarded as alpha code which has been utilized in a production capacity but requires careful shepherding. In particular, configuration settings must be hardcoded into the script itself and assumptions are made about the source Story data. YMMV and YHBW.

License

This code is released under the Apache v2.0 license.

Related Projects

Official FCC Resources

• FCC - Developers (APIs)
• FCC - Github

PHP

• docket-stuffer - FreePress Docket Stuffer tool by @hdyami

Ruby

• ecfs - “Helps you parse the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System”; appears to be read-only retrieval of records.
• fcc-content-api - “A Ruby wrapper for the FCC Content API”