ACTivism

PROJECT DEMO VIDEO LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uq7tutNH_QUXnyeDOb0FYg1JOYN4ssWW/view?usp=sharing

Inspiration

Recently, a law passed in my hometown that allows intoxication to be a defense for sexual assault. I was scared, I was outraged, and so was everyone I knew. Social media blew up with posts and I reposted everything I could to amplify the news. But, nothing happened.

This is a recurring pattern whenever the news cycle breaks out with the latest story. From racial violence to school shootings, we see rage, a sudden influx of social media support, and then nothing. We are stuck in a continuous cycle of rage, but real change never ensues. How do we translate this rage and frustration into tangible actions that will actually make a difference?

What it does

How we built it

Webscraping with Python library Newspaper3k and extracting keywords with Summa library Built database & rest API (Flask + Postgres) Built event submission web page + Chrome extension using Flask backend + HTML/CSS/JS frontend

Challenges we ran into

Originally we wanted to simply pull event data from 3rd party APIs (e.g. Eventbrite). However, because of API access limits and depreciation, we weren't able to get the data we wanted. Therefore, we switched to a user generated data model and built our own API instead. The challenge with this approach is to implement a validation method for these user submitted events.