HerVoice

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from a desire to empower women to engage in the political process and make their voices heard. Many women feel disconnected or unsure how to influence legislation, even though it directly impacts their lives. This platform bridges that gap by making it easier to learn about key bills, understand their impact, and take meaningful action, fostering confidence and advocacy.

What it does

This platform educates women about legislation that impacts their lives, provides explanations of how bills passing or veto could affect them, and offers actionable tools to voice their opinions. Users can track updates, get tailored recommendations, and are provided resources to take action by contacting legislators, signing petitions, or engaging in advocacy all in one space. Geolocation identifies the user’s town and county to deliver personalized insights and highlight the bills most relevant to their local and national community.

How we built it

In this project, we utilized the LLM (Llama-3.3-70b-Versatile via GROQ) for bill topic classification. For data storage, we used SQLite alongside SQLAlchemy. The back end and email notifications were developed with Flask, Flask-Mail, Flask Extensions, SQLAlchemy, and SQLite. For the front end, we employed HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create an engaging user interface.

To manage the workload effectively, our team divided responsibilities across front-end, back-end, and UX/UI design. This collaborative approach allowed us to work efficiently, ensuring that each component was seamlessly integrated and optimized for performance.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered significant challenges while integrating the frontend with the backend, as it required ensuring proper communication and synchronization between the two components of our application. Additionally, understanding how API keys function and their role in authenticating and securing access to APIs proved to be complex. This included learning how to properly manage and implement API keys to ensure secure and efficient interaction with third-party services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Users can subscribe to receive email notifications about policies they are particularly interested in, ensuring they stay updated on topics that matter to them. The webpage features a user-friendly and intuitively designed interface, making it easy for users to navigate and interact with the website seamlessly. The clean and visually appealing design enhances the overall user experience, with thoughtful layouts and aesthetic elements contributing to a professional and pleasant look. This ensures that users can engage with the platform effortlessly while appreciating its polished and modern appearance.

What we learned

We gained valuable experience in integrating multiple programming languages to ensure seamless functionality and smooth performance within a program. Additionally, we deepened our understanding of the applications of Generative AI (GenAI), Groq, and AI-driven interference, exploring how these technologies can enhance our project. We also came to appreciate the importance of a webpage's visual appeal and how it significantly impacts user engagement. With this in mind, we made a concerted effort to design our webpage to reflect the professionalism and aesthetics of high-quality websites, prioritizing both functionality and user experience.

What's next for HerVoice

To enhance our platform, we plan to improve the user interface (UI), making it more intuitive and visually appealing for seamless user interactions. Additionally, we aim to integrate a smarter AI system that can verify the status and legitimacy of a bill before sending notifications to users, ensuring that they receive accurate and trustworthy updates. As user interactions grow, we intend to upgrade our database to a more robust solution like SQL, enabling better scalability, performance, and reliability for handling increasing data demands. Moreover, we will work on refining our geolocation features to ensure precise and accurate results with minimal errors, further improving the functionality and user experience of our platform.

Built With

• css
• flask-extensions
• flask-mail
• html
• javascript
• llm
• python
• skeleton
• sqlalchemy
• sqlite