Hinder- Swipe Right for Change

Home Page
Your Information
Data received from Your Information
Hinder Page
Hinder Page 2
Hinder Page 3
Contact Page
Contact Page data received

Inspiration

The inspiration from our project came from wanting to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Qualified immunity, which allows cops to avoid accountability for misconduct, is still a legal doctrine. Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police in their lifetime. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still haven’t been arrested yet, even after more than 150 days since her death. Quierza Lewis still has the only life sentence for a non-violent drug offense in a state where black people are 23 times more likely to receive a life sentence for nonviolent crimes than their white counterparts. We must take a stand against systemic racism in our society, because neutrality in situations of injustice results in support for the oppressor. So, we created Hinder: a website where you can select petitions to automatically sign through a fun, tinder-like process.

What it does

Hinder is a website that allows users to easily scroll through petitions that support the Black Lives Matter movement. When they find a petition that they would like to sign, they simply need to click on a button. At this point the website would take data that the user inputs at the beginning (name, email, etc.) and use it to automatically sign a petition on the user’s behalf. This website has four tabs: Home Page, Your Information, Hinder, and Contact. The Home Page has general information about our website and its purpose. The Your Information page asks the users to input their personal information. This input is saved to a text file, which is then read to automatically sign petitions for the users. The Hinder Page is where users are able to choose which petitions they like and which ones they want to sign. Finally, the Contact page allows users to contact the team with any questions or suggestions on the website.

How we built it

We used Repl.it to collaborate with each other. To code our website, we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As for the presentation and video, we used Canva and Zoom, respectively.

Challenges we ran into

Most challenges that we ran into were pertaining to our lack of experience in creating websites. This is the first website that anyone in our team has created, so it was a very learning-based experience. This was the first time that some members had even coded in HTML and CSS, so they had to take time to learn these languages. Some other challenges we ran into were related to the breadth of our project; originally our website was going to send text messages that offered petitions and asked if you wanted to sign them. We later found out that there were a lot of legal protections around sending text messages, so we opted instead to transform the website into Hinder. Another goal in this project was to automatically find petitions through the use of Selenium, however we were not able to accomplish this due to a lack of experience and time. This will not negatively affect our project, however, because we are able to manually input possible petitions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Firstly, none of our team members knew how to code in HTML (and CSS) two days ago. During this weekend, our team not only brainstormed and developed this entire idea, but we also learned how to code in HTML to create our website. There were two aspects of our website that we initially had trouble with, but eventually figured out how to implement on our website. We learned how to use ActiveXObjects to write to a text file. Then, we were able to use CSS to format our website really well and make it look as nice as possible.

What we learned

Our biggest learning accomplishment was definitely learning HTML and CSS, as all of our members either did not previously know HTML or had no experience in coding a website. Through this hackathon we learned a good portion of HTML and CSS formatting techniques, and how to properly code a website. Furthermore, this is the first hackathon for all team members. We had to learn to control the breadth of our experiment, as our original plans were far too big for a two-day hackathon. Additionally, we had to find a resource that allowed us to collaboratively code and we had to learn how to piece our code together. Because of our inexperience, we were not well-versed in coding with other people.

What's next for Hinder- Swipe Right for Change

If we were to continue to develop this solution, we would need to continually update our list of petitions, as certain petitions become outdated and new ones come along. For this, we want to program for automatic updates. We could also expand to displaying petitions that support causes other than the BLM movement. Additionally, as of now, all of the data that a user enters is sent to a text file. To take this one step further, we could instead keep all data in a database to ensure that the user’s personal information is secure. We would also need to make our website public, by registering for a domain and hosting it on cloud. One of the most important aspects of any product is to make sure that it is being used. We would advertise our website on our personal social media and perhaps purchase some ads as well.