Citizen Hero

A gamified platform for engaging with city politics. Interact with your representatives and peers, earn xp, cosmetics, complete quests and achievments while participating in local politics.

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Inspiration

Only about 30% of eligible voters are involved in local politics. For most people, the barrier to entry is quite high. Often council meetings happen are times where people are working, unlike federal and national politics, local politics do not have much representation in the media and it is often hard to find out about what is happening, and the reward for participating is often meager. This results in local political decisions being skewed towards those demographics who have time and resources to participate.

What it does

Citizen Hero is intended as a one-stop shop for all local politics info, with similar UI across all counties and cities. Being a mobile / desktop app, it would facilitate access to local politics to those who are perhaps working or too busy or uninformed to attend them. It leans heavily into gamification by adding achievements, leaderboards, exp , levels, quest and more planned. We also aim to spice up the meetings by allowing a live "twitch-style" chat alongside the meeting, along with tabs to "Ask Questions" to the council members and "Polls" tab for representatives to conduct live polls during leetings. The goal here is to allow communities of people using the platform to get to know each other and their local political ecosystem and participate in a casual yet rewarding way.

How we built it

The app is currently a web app written in React, but we would eventually like to port it to mobile. We have a python-flask-mongodb app that provides APIs to enter in meeting schedules (more planned!). Our eventual goal to make this sustainable is to collaborate with the councils directly and have them populate the meeting schedule through our APIs. As a backup we also plan to create web scrapers that populate the council schedule.

Challenges we ran into

  • Too ambitious for a hackathon project - we have quite a few unfinished / incomplete pages

*We actually have a plane flight planned during the second half of the hackathon (due to weather issues) This gave use less time than we would have liked.

  • We walked on each other's feet a lot, between merge conflicts and vision conflict, we could have planned better

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We think our idea has good potential, we have tried to ground our ideas in something that could actually happen
  • Somehow managed to finished all the pages planned in the Figma and styled them better than the Figma.
  • Very cool looking XP bar
  • Did actually get to sleep and still finish the project.

What we learned

  • Better team collaboration
  • How local governments work
  • Possible frameworks for getting government data.

What's next for Citizen Hero'

We want to continue building this and turn this project into a reality. Aside from general polish and actually integrating this service with a council, we want to add livestreaming support - something that is going to be a fun challenge as many different councils use different platforms for streaming their meetings

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