Council Connect

Inspiration

With Gen Z being a generation that wants change to be made in the world, they often go to social media to have their voices be heard. However, with how much every platform has millions of users active and all of them voicing their opinions, they often end up in void that is social media as their messages get buried by others. Even more frequently as well, people tend to forget to take action in their local government and often times bills and laws that have heavier impact on people's everyday lives tend to be ignored as people don't pay attention to them. Our team acknowledged this and wanted to create a way that allows everyday citizens to have a larger impact by connecting their voices with their local government.

What it does

Council Connect is primarily a chat room that can let anyone in the community voice their opinions by simply voting on polls and making comments on the different boards. These boards are categorized into different sections, by county and towns, as well as the pending bills and recently passed laws. People who are in the local government will be able to check the information and comments that are being made in the site and can have a better judgment as to what the people want in the community.

Challenges we ran into

There were two main challenges that our team ran into while developing the site. One of them was that while trying to create a dataclass that allows the user to create a profile, it was very difficult to try and extract the information that could be obtained from the various function within the NiceGui library. More specifically the radio function. Another challenge, which affected the entire process, was trying to learn how the library worked on the spot and trying to understand the limited documentation that was made within the NiceGui site and other forums online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating the various pages that are meant to be accessed throughout the website and having most of our features be active in each. This includes having an account creation page, county specific pages, main page, and contacts page.

What we learned

We learned to be able to analyze a new library and use the functions available to a proficient level of being able to create a new program. Additionally, we learned how to be able to analyze a problem with just a simple prompt and set our own criteria to match the end product that we wanted to create despite the limited advice and guidance that was given to us.

What's next for Council Connect

Having the skeleton of what could be a site that can affect any person down to the town or city level, this can become a site that can be expanded upon to be supported in all 50 states so that everyone's voices can be heard and people have a more impactful effect in their local government. Additionally, with the help of algorithms that analyze the person's comments and poll responses, we could try and have their feed have information about events happening in their community. This can be with analyze if they are looking for help like food scarcity or unemployment, or more active roles like protests and general town meetings that are being held. The end goal would be for the site to gain enough traction that could maybe even reward users for frequently logging in and participating as well as having the site being actively announced in places like public libraries or community centers for access those whose voices tend to be ignored because of lack of resources.

Built With

• dataclasses
• nicegui
• python