YourWord.Quest

The quest for accountable leadership of the world. News are for a season, but the words in them are used to make decisions meant to be in effect for decades and should not be forgotten.

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Inspiration

It's another election year in my country, and leaders are back with even better promises than they had last time. All while the promises that they made last time remain (broken? pending? lost?) I'm really not sure.

I tried digging and it's really hard to find who promised what 5 years ago and where that promise is now. This inspired me to create a project management system for leaders that relies on the public for it's sustenance

What it does

Most of the promises are made in press conferences, news interviews, tweets e.t.c but the information is soon forgotten as it's swallowed up by new news.

YourWord.Quest tracks information that is normally seasonal and unstructured into structured content that when put together can help understand the performance of leaders and organizations on their promise to the public.

How we built it

It's not easy to find a database that can make sense of the schema below and query it efficiently. DB Schema

TigerGraph enabled the schema above and the queries behind making things easier to develop. It's supported by Google Cloud Firestore for document storage(things that don't need advanced filters and complex relations, e.g. html content) and Elasticsearch for text searching and providing autocompletion functionality. The three databases complement each other to deliver a product that would be missing something without each one of them.

The UI is build with typescript and react. Microsoft fluent UI is used for most components and mobx used to help with data binding. The UI is deployed to Firebase Hosting and uses Firebase Authentication.

The backend is built on python with the APIs built on falcon. The backend is deployed to Google Cloud Run.

All this is publicly available on our github profile

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was time, this is a new product and it needed to be presentable within 20 days with close to no knowledge of graph databases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Leaning graph databases
  • Getting a chance to build a dream and a path to get it out to the world

What we learned

  • Graph databases can be stressful to setup, but once setup they're a powerful tool to have and can save a lot of time and effort that you'd need to get the same functionality from any other database.

What's next for YourWord.Quest

  • Collecting information We need to get the word out for people to contribute more information to build up a usable database
  • Provide more insights We've built a lot of connections in the database and they're not obvious to the user in the current user interface as presented.
  • Find more contributors This was an idea that I was toying with in my mind and pondering over it's future, now that I have a version of it built, I'd only like to see it grow from there, it will need more developers and moderators to succeed.

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