Bill-t Different

Inspiration

For many of us, this coming November will be the first time we are eligible to vote in a presidential election. With this comes the responsibility of casting an educated vote. However, too often access to digestible legislative content is difficult to attain. On one hand, ballot measures themselves are excessively convoluted with legal jargon, making it difficult for the average voter to understand and effectively take a stance. And on the flip side, summaries provided for big news outlets are often biased and prioritize influence over education.

What it does

For these reasons, we chose to develop an interactive platform that provides access to AI-generated, easy-to-understand descriptions of ballot measures, as well as leading pros and cons to ensure that our users can BILL-T different by Being In the Legislative Loop Today!

How we built it

We built our project by collaborating over Github to create a website hosted by Github pages. Our primary languages were HTML, CSS, and Javascript. In order to integrate Chat-GPT into our website we also used an API key to add user functionality.

Challenges we ran into

As a team of first-time hackers and web developers, many roadblocks were encountered over the course of creating this website. Through learning how to use GitHub, not knowing where to start, figuring out how and where to implement new features throughout the process, and encountering the myriad of issues that can occur when coding, we discovered very quickly how many resources and references, both in-person and online, are available to assist with nearly any problem we ran into. From spending over an hour to fix a bug to becoming an expert who could help a teammate solve the same issue in 5 minutes, we not only gained technical experience, but learned firsthand how a seemingly individual project like this actually requires collaboration to the highest degree. One of the biggest challenges we faced, but also the reason for our website’s greatest strengths, was that website features were constantly changing and evolving as we uncovered the range of what computer science allowed us to do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our final product includes functions we didn’t even know were possible to code, however, along the way we struggled to focus our efforts on feats we could achieve in a 36 hour period and so many ideas had to be set aside for future iterations. All of our developing ideas also helped us to work as a team as we figured out how to split up the work