Inspiration
Our inspiration for PoliPact stems from the desire to empower individuals to make informed political decisions. We believe that by providing users with a personalized experience, including tailored candidate recommendations and essential voting information, we can contribute to a more engaged and informed electorate that will be more likely to go out and vote.
What it does
PoliPact allows users to take a short quiz about their political views. Using this information and their location, the platform identifies political candidates at the national, state, city, and local levels that align with the user's views. Additionally, it provides details about the closest polling location and voting days, encouraging and facilitating political participation.
How we built it
We built PoliPact using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: HTML for structuring the content, CSS for styling, and JavaScript for dynamic interactions and quiz functionality.
Challenges we ran into
During the development of PoliPact, we encountered several challenges. Collecting data for each candidate was particularly time-intensive and integrating location-based services and refining the algorithm for candidate matching were especially difficult. Overcoming these challenges required a lot of teamwork and collaborative problem-solving.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team was entirely made up of freshmen who are new to hackathons and programming in general so we definitely had a lot of moments where we were confused with a bug or wasn't sure how to proceed. Still, we were able to think through our bugs by working together and successfully created a platform for political change.
What we learned
Building PoliPact provided us with valuable insights into user experience design, algorithm development, and location-based services. We also got a lot of experience with front-end development.
What's next for PoliPact
Currently, our database of candidates and polling locations is limited to locations near Columbia. In the future, we hope to expand it so other cities and states would have access to all the features of PoliPact. Additionally, we hope to improve our algorithm to better match users to their ideal candidates by expanding the information we have on each candidate and refining our quiz.
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