Govpedia

Govpedia - A central hub containing information on USA Government Federal, State and agencies for users especially underrepresented communities to search for their representatives easily.

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by the fact that black and underrepresented groups do not easily have access to their government representatives in order to advocate for funding opportunities and community resources. With a lot of fake news going around, it is hard to find out what is real and what is manipulated truths. As a team, we believed that combining a hub of information that users can search easily for their representatives in various arms of government can help accelerate advocacy processes.

What it does

Govpedia -name inspired by encyclopedia😊 is a Central hub that contains information on USA Government Federal, State and agencies in the new administration. We believe that this administration is more receptive to people of color and underrepresented groups and knowing where to find information is very crucial. There is also a web search engine/search page to enter your state and find who is representing your district , then reach out to them.

How we built it

This project was built using node.js framework with Javascript language for the backend development. We then sourced for datasets on kaggle.com which was cleaned and hosted using MongoDB Compass and MongoDB Atlas respectively. Frontend was built via HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using jQuery.

In order to see the effectiveness of the backend development, the output was hosted on Glitch.com and Postman.com which helped framed the frontend development using React and bootstrap

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we ran into includes:

  • Coming up with the idea itself
  • Trying to bring everyone together with equal level of commitment (Whew! that was hard)
  • Team members are first time hackers and created a lot of learning curve
  • We also had to learn from scratch how to build a backend and frontend ; then connect them together

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We were able to build something from scratch and make it work
  • We learnt about backend development and front end in 12hours!
  • We finally figured out what worked for the team and was able to synchronize at the end of the day(Big win!)
  • Made new and amazing connections and as well learnt something new

What we learned

  • We learned how to get the frontend to interact with the backend

What's next for Govpedia

  • We hope we can fully develop the website to make it functioning and also source for more recent and relevant datasets.
  • More modern design and user interface
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