Inspiration
Nowadays, young people are simply not interested in politics. Over 50 percent of people aged 18-29 say they don't have enough time to look into politics or just aren't interested. We wanted to change that with PoliticsHQ.
We were inspired by the recent action taken by high school students throughout the country in speaking out against gun violence. We wanted an app that could simplify information gathering and make it easy for people (especially young people) to interact with interest groups and their representatives in Congress.
What it does
PoliticsHQ has several screens within the app.
- Twitter feeds of US Senators
- Donate to interest groups who align with your cause
- Contact your House representative
- View current bills in Congress
How we built it
We used requests and BeautifulSoup to scrape links and blurbs about interest groups from Wikipedia. We used nltk's NaiveBayesClassifier to group interest groups if they were pro- or con- certain issues. We used the same libraries to find congresspeople using latitude and longitude coordinates. We fed this data into a flask database using CloudFlare. We connected this to our frontend iOS app.
Challenges we ran into
Scraping links from Wikipedia was harder than we expected. We also ran into some bugs connecting to the flask backend.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to successfully get links for many interest groups, even the small and not very active ones.
What we learned
We're much more proficient in web scraping and iOS development.
What's next for PoliticsHQ
Page ranking algorithms to rank interest groups on political activity.
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