Homepage for viewing upcoming and past bills
AI description of bills + ability to weigh in
Integrity rating for your personal MP
Accompanying wesbite front page

Inspiration

Voting turnout amongst the younger generations get lower every year due to a feeling that voting does not have a significant impact. We wanted to apply modern technology to bring citizens and their elected politicians closer together.

What it does

Our project consists of 2 components: An app used by people to voice their opinions on any upcoming bills before their MP submits their vote, and a website which allows for MPs to gauge the general opinions regarding upcoming votes and allows people to hold their politicians accountable by keeping a record of their past votes and whether they align with the majority of people.

How we built it

The app portion of this project was mostly built using Dart and Flutter on VS Code. It was chosen due to its platform flexibility and streamlined UI design. The website was made with HTML/CSS, while the backend used Tiger Data for database information.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges during this hackathon, the biggest of which being predictably the timeframe. We had so many ideas for features to implement and for extra functionality, however we needed to scale down our ambitions to get it ready in time. Despite that we are proud of the work we got done in such a short period of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Not only were we able to get a functioning product over such a short period of time, but we were able to get it relatively feature complete. That includes a searchable database of previous and upcoming bills, all MPs and their voting record, the app users' voting and how it aligns with results, and AI helper explaining any particular bill for the average person, a website to streamline the ability for people to search for MPs as well as for the MPs themselves to view the consensus regarding a law, and much more. This demonstrates the importance of teamwork as none of us would have been able to get nearly this much done individually.

What we learned

Although one of us was familiar with Flutter and Dart before this project, the other two had to learn it over the weekend. On top of that, we all had to get familiar with how databases are managed and implemented for the backend functionality which was way outside our comfort zone. We also refined our front end skills in order to make an accessible and functional GUI.

What's next for Capitoll

There is still so much potential for this idea, and we would love to see its potential achieved! After submission, we plan on polishing both the app and the website components. We also have many ideas of how to increase the usefulness, these include built in unbiased new reporting regarding the new laws and MPs, a financial integrity rating for each MP to hold them accountable in more ways than just their voting history, push notifications, the ability to message your MP regarding any bill, and much more.