Inspiration
It is often difficult to establish a smooth connection between a legislator and a citizen advocating change. In addition, most citizens have little knowledge regarding legislature at their local level of government.
What it does
ActionX is a platform where any citizen can post an idea advocating for a specific change in legislature or new legislature. Other users can either "support" or "oppose" the post. Supporting the post increases its approval rating by one point, and opposing the post decreases its approval rating by one point. On the main page, these "posts" are sorted by this approval rating. In addition, when you first create an account, the website asks for your address. Based on this, the website provides a page with the names and twitter handles of both local legislators and national legislators.
How we built it
We built the framework for the ActionX website from scratch using the flask framework. We used a combination HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap for the front end. We used the help of the flask framework, python, and SQLite for the back end.
Challenges we ran into
All of us were completely new to web development. We all only knew the basics of programming in python before coming into this hackathon. As a result, we spent a lot of time learning how to integrate HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. We also spent a lot of time learning how to use SQLite for storing our data. Thus, the bulk of our time was spent on understanding example code and implementing it into our own website.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made a seamless authentication system which helps maintains to keep data for the user to edit or delete posts. We also managed to learn and implement HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SQLite, and Flask. We had no idea how to use any of these coming into the hackathon. In the end, our website had an attractive, modern design. It also smoothly managed the storage of multiple users and posts.
What we learned
We learned how to use HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SQLite, and Flask.
What's next for ActionX
We can improve the ActionX website by taking some time to clean up the look. We were able to display a search bar with the purpose of using an elastic search to bring up recent posts regarding the keyword, but we did not have enough time to properly implement the elastic search. We also will add a feature that instantly alerts local legislators via twitter once a post has reached a high enough approval rating. For ActionX we want shift to firebase because it is more intuitive and easier platform then SQLite. Also, it will give us more functionality which we scraped for our current project.
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