Inspiration
We come from different backgrounds but were inspired by each other's desires to improve our respective communities.
What it does
Citizen Help provides community members a method to contact public services for help via interactive text messages.
How we built it
We used Twilio and Python to create a code that develops interactive text messages to return the appropriate contact info/phone number for the public service that can help solve the community member's problem. We considered the different types of problems that people in our own communities run into and searched for the best department/public service to contact for assistance.
Challenges we ran into
It was difficult to override internal messages received from the community member and use cookies to prevent this.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We learned how to use the "session" technique in Twilio to update each text message received so that its internals could be analyzed and processed through the loop.
What we learned
We learned how to use the dictionary technique in Python to store the names of the public service departments and their telephone numbers so that this information could be retrieved more efficiently later on in the code. We also learned how to group the various types of text messages received based on key words and subject titles so that our code could process the category of desired assistance to deliver the contact information we have available.
What's next for Citizen Help
Our next step for Citizen Help is to incorporate a program that can interpret pixels and pictures to decipher the public service category in replace of submitting texted words to overcome communication and language barriers.
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