PoliSpace

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Website: http://polispaceapp.webflow.io/ Technology is a powerful platform that can help us identify and address issues of inequality and accessibility within our local and global communities. In choosing the Community track, we are working to create a solution that assists a community we are a part of, and care about.

Voter Turnout is considered a measure of civic participation that many people believe best gauges the health of the electoral process. As per records, 143 million eligible Americans failed to vote in the 2014 midterm elections. And America is in good company: citizens in other developed countries, such as Switzerland and Luxembourg, also report low turnouts. Most of us spend more time seeking out information when we decide what new television to buy than on deciding who should be out next president or which party should control Congress.

Democracies rest on the ability of the general public to hold their elected officials accountable. But what happens when a large segment of voters knows very little or biasedly about today’s policy debates or even the basic workings of their government?

PoliSpace believes that for a nation’s democracy to function properly and for government to provide fair representation, all eligible citizens must have the opportunity to vote—and be encouraged to do so. Aimed at increasing "informed" voter participation, PoliSpace is a react-native application, that interacts with a proxy server hosted on Google Cloud App Engine written in Express.js to hit Google Cloud Natural Language Processing API, in order for us to classify what issues/concerns our users are interested in, provide them with unbiased information about their representatives while holding them accountable, begin a dialog in the local communities and give them the power to impact their immediate societies.

We practiced techniques rooted in human centered design to work on the design and research problems we would like to hack overnight. DubHacks proved to be a great opportunity for us to delve into NLP using AWS and Google Cloud, cross-platform application development using React-Native and Expo, and web development and hosting using WebFlow.

We'd like to thank the DubHacks team and sponsors for giving us the opportunity to create, empower, innovate and make new friends along the way!