GoVid

Inspiration

The idea of GoVid came to us because we constantly had to look in multiple places for information on our state officials to figure out what was happening currently in terms of opening up. Additionally, as it is election year, we also wanted the people to see who their current representatives were and how they were handling opening up after the pandemic. That information can help users to decide on who they want to vote for this upcoming election season. We felt it was important that people have all of this information in one place - a reliable source for everything to do with your government related to COVID.

What it does

When you get on GoVid website, you will see a map of the US. If you click on a state, a popup appears with information on your governor's Twitter, unemployment filing, voting information, as well as your representatives in the Senate and the House of Representative. Also there is a News tab that shows the latest COVID-19 news, so you can get all of the new COVID related news while you are looking for information on your state's government.

How we built it

We built this project with React. We used public APIs from Postman to get the news as well as an API from Whoismyrepresentative to pull all the state politicians information. In addition, we used an API for Covid Tracking to get the current information of the cases in each state. We added SVG files for each state that gave us the ability to add on hover and on click effects, to show each state's information

Challenges we ran into

Getting current data from the API and setting up the map to respond correctly were the biggest challenges for us. When implementing the requests for the APIs, we kept running into errors that were hard to eliminate without using DRY code. Also, we started this project with 4 people, each with specific roles, but unfortunately one person had to back out, so we all ended up doing a little bit of everything.

What's next for goVid

To continue working on goVid, we will get more news sources and scrape more data from APIs so that we can have more information available to anyone who wants to use our website!