Podium

Inspiration

The current landscape in which we receive news is overwhelming in both content and exploration. Finding articles relevant to your interests and locations can seem daunting or even impossible. We wanted to create a platform that made it easier to get what we truly wanted out of news, not just a bunch of SEO optimized clickbait.

What it does

Podium gets hot off the press news from the place where local proposals and projects come to life: the town hall. Using Gemini, we transcribe recordings from town hall meetings, and then we create articles covering different topics brought up during the meeting. These articles are stored in a database for users to fetch at any time through our fun and simple frontend.

How we built it

Podium was build using a typescript react frontend, and a python backend utilizing the gemini api, and a sqlite database. We used fastapi to handle sending requests between the backend and frontend (e.g. sending requests for articles, and serving them from the dd accordingly).

Challenges we ran into

This was our first full-stack app created in these frameworks and tools. The setup and usage of the environment and frameworks was in most cases unfamiliar to all of us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our original vision for the project was realized without many compromises.

What we learned

We now have experience in building a frontend with Typescript and React, a REST API with Python and FastAPI, and backend which communicates with the Gemeni API.