Sustainable Police

a twitter bot to retweet sustainability issues and bring them all at one place

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Inspiration

The earth is meant to be shared along every species and everyone has equal right over it. Whatever development takes place by humans should ensure that it is sustainable and its not harming the environment at any levels. But, we all know that we are very far from achieving a totally sustainable environment for ourselves. People do raise voices and concerns regarding the same but many a times they go unnoticed. That is what our inspiration was behind building sustainable police as our project submission for WildHacks 2.

What it does

Sustainable Police is a twitter bot (@SustainPolice) which retweets any tweet that is related to sustainability issues. It focuses on bringing all the relevant tweets at one place to curate the data which could be presented to citizens or officials in a nice manner. We've made sure that the bot is only tweeting important things, for that, we've ensured that:-

  • The tweet must contains specific hashtags/terms such as deforestation, climatechange and more.
  • The tweet must not contain any profane or abusive term and shouldn't be demeaning.
  • The tweet should have English as its primary language to ensure that its being understood globally.

We've also made a website for the same which has some important links that people might want to look into and learn more about sustainability and sustainable development. https://aakzsh.github.io/sustainablepolice

How we built it

For making this twitter bot, we utilized the APIs provided by twitter development portal. We made the scripts in python, used specific ML based libraries to find out the tweet's language and usage of profane words. We have hosted the bot on Heroku, which runs every 6 hours, that is 4 times a day, and curates and retweets the relevant tweets. For making the website, we used HTML and CSS, and hosted the same on GitHub pages!

Challenges we ran into

We faced some issues while accessing twitter APIs, since by default it only gives read only access. So we had to work our way around it. Also, we were on a time crunch so completing everything on time was a task.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that our bot has a real world impact and can help in contributing towards making the environment more sustainable.

What we learned

We learnt about twitter APIs, bots and making it work with python. Also, while researching about sustainability we came across various links that helped us learn interesting facts about it.

What's next for Sustainable Police

We want to work on automating the bot and also improve the ml model so that it can fetch relevant tweets in real time!

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