CIVITAS - Community Driven Software

Inspiration

The prompt inspired our group to consider each of the numerous facets that go into engaging civic participation, and ultimately we focused our project on the 6 most crucial elements that foster this through our app. These 6 key elements that people would benefit from are: (1) Having an avenue to explore community volunteering opportunities (Volunteer); (2) Knowing their community, their government, and their representatives to know the people in charge (Government); (3) Keeping up with recent Local News, targeted specifically to their city, state and zip code (News); (4) Having a place to discuss community and civic issues with other community members (Forum); (5) Tracking the problems and seeing the change they have helped to build; and (6) Knowing that they can always turn to each other for help, or to spread their help beyond their community if possible (Pay It Forward)!

What it does

Our application serves as a hub for the common person to increase civic engagement through multiple methods. From personal engagement (via volunteering opportunities), to personal learning (via the information provided on our government representatives, and targeted local news), to the more community-driven application (via the discussion forums, impact tracking, and resource sharing). Our vast and accessible program overcomes common barriers to civil engagement by providing a user friendly platform with personalization to incentivize users to increase engagement over time.

How we built it

Our platform was mainly built using BootStrap library along with Artificial Intelligence and API development. For instance, we webscraped the news by creating our own API to scrape the data, which was then used to supply data to the news portion of our application. Our AI analyzes the characteristics of each user and identifies specific chat paths that would be most helpful and related to them, with the central goal of promoting civic participation in a fun, unique, and comprehensive manner.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was making the Artificial Intelligence as all-encompassing as we had hoped -- given the time constraint and the lack of real user data available, we were able to implement a somewhat small subset of the total functionality we were hoping for. However, given the groundwork we have completed we are in a good position to enhance this functionality by integrating our current code through training with actual datasets as part of future work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of having implemented 6 separate, yet fully cohesive parts to our application in such a short time. The challenge of working for the full 24 hours while keeping track of the numerous changes each of the four of us were making simultaneously proved to be slightly challenging at times, but we emerged from the project with a much better understanding of clean coding procedures. Additionally, working with technologies that we weren’t familiar with proved to be a great learning curve. Therefore, the development process was challenging, yet very rewarding as we got to have a hands-on learning experience.

What we learned

For a few of us, it was our first time using Bootstrap at this level, and despite the initial complexity that we had to navigate through, we all came out of the Hackathon feeling much more confident in our web development skills and our knowledge of APIs and web development tools/frameworks. Additionally, we gained more exposure to artificial intelligence and how it can improve the user experience.

What's next for CIVITAS - Community Driven Software

As part of next steps, CIVITAS hopes to more comprehensively complete the AI functionality we implemented over these past 24 hours. More importantly, we hope to fine tune the application to adequately meet our users specific needs through more rigorous user-testing. Considering the dearth of applications that currently exist to cover the various functionalities that our application achieves, we are confident in the uniqueness of our design, and hope to build upon and improve this in the future.