SwiftVote

Inspiration

At UW, there is an enormity of tuition money to manage. Our student governments have a small amount of control -- still totaling some thirty million dollars -- over these funds. My experiences in student government showed me the results that such flexible student control can achieve. However, the process of managing these funds is arduous enough already. Making decisions on proposals should be the easy part -- after reviewing a proposal, decide! But voting can be long, taxing, and inefficient.

What it does

That's why we created SwiftVote to solve this specific and clear problem. SwiftVote is a software that facilitates line-item voting on proposals with lengthy and detailed budgets in a more fair, representative way.

How we built it

We focused on building the clientside app, integrating the crucial components of data grid view for voters. After mocking up the app on a whiteboard, we then wrote out the design logic. We first tried to implement the data grid for line items ourselves; but found the task immensely difficult. Thereafter, we switched to using third-party libraries.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of SwiftVote, one of the major challenges we encountered was learning how to use our central DataGrid technology. We went through several different libraries, all of which failed to meet our needs, before landing on AG Grid.

What we learned

We learned a lot about integrating third-party JS components into our own code, especially library-agnostic components (like AG Grid) that have idiosyncratic APIs.

What's next for SwiftVote

Next, we need to finish SwiftVote! SwiftVote needs a backend, and importantly, it needs an easy and streamlined way of getting budgets onto the screen without manually inputting line item values.

Built With

• css
• material
• react
• typescript