Inspiration
We were overwhelmed by the apathy and negativity everyone has towards politics. These are supposed to be our representatives, yet many people see politicians as someone who does not represent them or their community. The protests this past year were an inspiring way to see voices heard and many of the policy changes proved that when people speak up change can happen.
The activism over the past year has momentum that we did not want to slow down. Taking inspiration from people making change through their voices we made a convenient solution for people to stay politically engaged. When we are united in our messaging, elected representatives listen.
What it does
We combined the connivence of digital with the physical presence and power of mailed letters. With our application, people can type a message to their elected officials that will be physically delivered to them.
We call our product The Paper Voice
How we built it
The product we built is an MVP. To create the MVP we forked an existing repository that used Google Civic API to find representatives. From there we configured in our own API key and hosted the page on GitHub. Once on GitHub we customized the javascript to move the representatives information into a form that will trigger a postcard to be mailed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We printed and sent a physical postcard! Mike Bonin will hear our voice and we are making a small 8"x6" difference in our democracy.
What we learned
We learned more about Javascript than we had before. Coding was new to everyone on the team, but we're truly proud of our working prototype. The Figma session was fantastic and was able to take us from making a design to making a prototype people can click around on.
What's next for The Paper Voice
We're planning to build out the MVP to work with all jurisdictions. After that, we will finalize the design and start doing preliminary market research. If the results are good we can look for partners and investors.
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