Inspiration
We wanted to create a tool that aims to improve citizens’ understanding of politics. We hope that this could kickstart people's interest in learning/paying more attention to politics. This would make discussion more accessible to those who may not have had a complete education. People who have voted before will probably already vote, but many of those who were non-voters especially need to be encouraged to vote, keeping in mind non-voters have tended to be minorities
What it does
This is a Chrome browser extension that allows users to highlight unfamiliar political terms or phrases to better understand these political jargon through community discussions. Through the extension, they may view other questions and comments left by others whilst also allowing them to add to the discussion themselves.
How I built it
We followed a basic chrome extension tutorial and used javascript, css, html, and jquery to personalize and implement the mini discussion forum.
Challenges I ran into
In the beginning, we initially had a hard time narrowing the scope and planning how each major element of the extension would work. We realized some of the things we wanted to see ended up being too difficult to implement or too complicated for the time restraints we had. Another major challenge we ran into was figuring out a good database/way to store information of each highlight.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud that was our first Chrome extension we have ever built; jumping through the hurdles that were presented with this project really pushed us out of our comfort zones and challenged us with something we have never done before. We are proud of this idea and how, with some refinement, it can help us educate minorities and non-voters about the society we live in.
What I learned
We learned that it is good to be ambitious and grand with your ideas, but it's best to think realistically and narrower so that less time is wasted trying to do things that may too complicated.
What's next for Politerate
We want to use natural language processing to flag comments that are subjective, discriminatory, etc. so that it improves the reliability of the information being posted. And we want to improve the popup by including bookmarks, personal notes, etc. as a way to personalize the user's little politics dictionary. Also by allowing alerts for updates or weekly digests on threads/topics users can follow will further foster the personalization of the extension. Lastly, and most importantly, we want to make it compatible with other websites.
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