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Politagree logo
Inspiration
Voter turnouts haven be falling consistently over the last 4 elections from their already low turnout rates. One major reason for this is a lack of information about politicians.
What it does
Politagree uses an algorithm to process a user's survey response into quantifiable affinities toward certain issues, such as privacy and taxes. On the backend, the server queries data from Govtrack.us to calculate scores for currently in office politicians on the same issues. Politagree compares those scores to match you with the politicians that most closely align with your view. It also provides key-word searchable voting records for the politician that matches you. For each topic, Politagree also provides quick overview of the last three bills that were voted on by the House or Senate.
How we built it
Front End
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Jinja2, Bootstrap
MiddleWare
Ajax
Back End
Python, Flask
Challenges we ran into
Technical
Formatting the website among different resolutions.
Deciding a layout for the page.
Combining the multitude of languages into a coherent product.
Handling asynchronous requests in a real time manner in Ajax.
Modifying HTML data through JQuery without destroying the original data.
Adjusting logo colors and designs.
Working with the nested dictionaries in lists in dictionaries in dictionary in the Govtrack.us API
Expertise
Learning JQuery on site. Learning to call Jinja2 variables on JQuery
Misc
Lack of Senate Votes
Wesley pushing the .py cache of a visual studio flask project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Integrating Bootstrap into HTML
Not giving up when languages abandoned us
Interacting with different frameworks to create a coherent and cohesive experience
Building a website from scratch with 4 languages and 5 libraries
Actually shipping a working demo.
Learning languages
Not fucking up our source control
What we learned
Lots of languages and libraries.
Working as team. Govtrack API
What's next for Politagree
Full scale national congressional integration
Multiple Topic processing and usage
Graphical representations of bill status, type.
Dynamic Info pages that auto aggregate information from around the net and the Govtrack.us database for each bill.
Dynamic Info pages that auto aggregate information from around the net and the Govtrack.us database for each politician
State government integration
More informative result pages
Including different APIs to allow cross platform presentation.
Smart pages that aggregate information on certain issue topics and keywords.
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