InformedVotr

A website to help people better understand confusing bills and laws with the goal of helping them become more informed voters.

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Inspiration

As a new voter, I believe it's important that I and everyone else who is voting for the first time ensure we are really educated about issues in the world that the politicians we vote for stand for, with the goal of being more informed voters in the upcoming election.

What it does

InformedVotr has three main features: For each bill: 1) Groq AI-driven summarization to transform raw bill text data into something easy to understand. 2) An option for users to explore content related to the specific bill in the media to read others' perspectives on the issue. For all users in general: 3) A newsletter (to eventually receive updates about new legislation in their state and/or related to their industry of interest).

How I built it

I built the frontend with React in JavaScript and the backend with Flask in Python. I received my data containing official raw bill text data from the LegiScan API ("a legislative tracking and data services for all 50 states & Congress across public and professional sectors").

Challenges

I had never deployed a React project to the web before, but I had heard of multiple ways people had done this with cloud platforms such as AWS, Heroku, and Vercel before. After researching which platforms were most beginner-friendly and were compatible with how my project was setup, I decided to go with deploying my backend on Heroku and frontend on Vercel. Debugging issues with conflicting requirements/peer dependencies issues took many hours, but after asking for help from mentors and gaining insight on how I can change my project setup to split up my frontend and backend into two separate directories helped set me in the right direction to accomplish this.

Accomplishments

I'm proud of myself for asking for help and also not giving up on this process. There were many moments when I felt like I would never get out of an endless cycles of errors, but any time I got to that point I decided to take a little break to cool and off and come back to the code with a fresher mind. I also decided to ask for help from a mentor as well as the Groq representative, and both of these people gave me very useful advice that I ultimately integrated into my project.

Learnings

This project definitely got me a lot more familiar with both React and Git. I began learning how to use React this summer, but really having to apply it to complete a full-stack project on my own was a learning experience of itself which left me with no choice but to get familiar with Git if I wanted to deploy it.

What's next for InformedVotr

I hope to add more features such as an option for users to select the state they live in as well as select from a drop-down menu the potential industries they work in/are involved with when joining the newsletter. With that data, I want to send a weekly newsletter where they receive updates about new legislative-related changes/updates that may affect their state/industry of interest.

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