The Lobbyists

Crowdfunded community lobbying to give the American people a fighting chance against corporate interests.

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Inspiration

We were frustrated that political issues supported by the majority of Americans are shut down due to the efforts and interests of corporate lobbyists. Congressmen are so worried about financing their reelection campaigns that they ignore the will of the general public. Since it is legal for corporate lobbyists to donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, we feel that it is necessary for the American public to band together and fight the legal corruption present in our political system.

What it does

We provide a platform to crowdfund community lobbyists that will represent the opinions of the general public in government politics. Issues are broken into 3 subsections: local, state and national issues. These issues are then funded by individual donations which will be used to pay for the services of a professional lobbyist. At the beginning, we will work with polling agencies to identify widely supported issues and ultimately raise capital to influence legislation in favor of the American people. For example, universal background checks for firearm purchases are supported by about 90% of the American public, however any legislation in favor of these background checks is shot down by the NRA (pun intended). The NRA is able to block legislation by using large amounts of money to lobby government officials. In this example, our website would allow the American people to crowdfund professional lobbyists to counter the NRA's campaigns.

How we built it

We used a LAMP stack environment to create a website that would allow registered users to submit, support, and donate to issues that are widely supported. We used MySQL to store important political issues and data to display on our webpage. We used bootstrap to create an intuitive interface that simple and easy to use. PHP was used to control events between the view and the database. Javascript and jQuery was used to format the data on the pages and in some cases asynchronously load information from the database. Additionally, we used xampp as our test environment and Git as our version control system.

Challenges we ran into

We had problems with developing a MySQL database that fit the requirements for our website and could also be scaled up. All members in our group were new to Git. We ran into some issues with getting merge conflicts between the sync cycles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to get most of our idea done that we wanted to in a timely fashion. We were able to design something that hadn't been done before with it being our own original idea. We did research on other similar websites but really made a point to distinguish our project and make an innovative solution to an important issue. Some of the other websites focused on campaign elections and controversial issues which hindered the effectiveness of the website and they fell short. The lobbying factor of our website is what makes it really stand apart from the others. We are proud that we say that our website fully gives power to people and helps solve real world problems.

What we learned

We learned about the importance of prototyping and laying out a concrete idea with manageable steps. We also learned the importance of communication between teammates and how much it affected our group when programming with multiple people at the same time.

What's next for The Lobbyists

The more we worked on this project, the more we wanted to implement it in a real world scenario. We started to see the real value in having a website like this go live and have it help people get real world issues resolved. This project was started because we had an idea of a way to help stop political corruption, and we now think that this idea is extremely realistic. Corruption in politics due to corporate money is clearly an important issue that has no current solution. If we were to implement this idea, a logical next step would be to partner with a professional marketing and lobbying firm, as their professional services and knowledge will allow us to implement our idea more efficiently. We hope that our website will help the future of our country and will give people the chance to participate in political decision making.

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