123policy

Inspiration

Ever since high school, I've had an interest in politics. But it was always a love hate relationship. I'm kind of a history nerd so naturally I enjoyed reading about politics. But at the same time It was always frustrating to see the state of political discourse, it always felt like people were distracted from the real issues. I felt like a large part of this was because of social media, but also because of how hard it is to stay informed and keep up with everything. Many people don't have the time or luxury to seek out primary sources so influencers and talking heads end up filling the gap, but not in the most accurate way. I felt like this was a major problem that also needed to be addressed, which is how information is delivered, so I decided on a project that would make some degree of important information available through aggregating government information.

What it does

123policy is a tracker for the federal U.S. government and serves as a informative and rating platform. Users can browse and search things like bills, executive orders, and supreme court cases, congressmen and get information about them. Users can also use the rating system as a way to voice their concerns. Users can also save government activities as well.

How we built it

The front end was built with Bolt, the back end with Supabase and cloud run. The summaries of things like bills were summarized using Gemini and Chatgpt. The site was deployed using Netlify, and domain management using IONOS. Information is sourced from congress.gov, federalregister.gov, and courtlistener.com.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges was getting to used to Bolt and Supabase. I had never used Bolt before, so I had to learn as I went, and doubly so for supabase because it was backend. Designing the UI was also a challenge since I personally haven't seen a site like this, so I had to do research by looking at sites like yelp and homes.com.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think the UI looks pretty nice for a government information site. I also think its nice how the site has a bit of content from the get go

What we learned

I learned a lot of concepts when it comes to webdev. Prior to this project I had never touched the backend, but the Bolt integration with Supabase and repeated exposure made it feel less abstract. I also learned there are a lot of neat tools out there, like API's. Doing this project made me appreciate developers more deeply, since its cool that they come together to build things that the public can use.

What's next for 123policy

There's definitely a lot of work to be done for the future, like getting more data, increasing the variation of data, better user experience, and so on.

Conclusion

This was a really a fun and learning experience. Just wanted to say thanks to the people at Bolt and also the community, since we were provided with the tools to make our passions a reality.