GroundUp - a voice for all

Inspiration

We believe that cities of the future should be built by those who live and interact with it daily. Despite government projects impacting communities each year and issues with city infrastructure, there are few ways for the common folk to provide input and shape the city we live in. This inspired us to create our project GroundUp, designed to allow people to have a say in how their community looks and where the government spends money on projects.

What it does

Allows people to view existing proposals, filtering based on location and categories and upvote them Our web application GroundUp allows people to view current projects in various stages from being proposed to being in progress, all the way to completion!

Our application allows users to browse and view existing proposals, with the option to filter them based on location and category. People can upvote the projects they support, making it easier to highlight initiatives that matter most to the community. Additionally, people can suggest their own proposals and have them reviewed by the appropriate community or government body.

How we built it

We built the platform using React for the frontend with Material UI for styling components, and Flask as the backend framework. We also used SQLite as our database, supported by Python for the backend logic.

Challenges we ran into

Once we had decided on an idea, our first challenge came with deciding our tech stack. While we initially decided on Next.js and the t3 framework, we found it too challenging and pivoted to a React and Flask stack instead, technologies which we were much more familiar with. Unfortunately this meant that we had lost considerable time trying to learn the framework and had to also (re)learn React and Flask. Another challenge was linking many of the Flask APIs with the React frontend, something which we had little practice with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With the hiccup at the beginning of the project, we’re proud that we created a working product. Additionally, most of us picked up React over the last 24 hours, a skill which will prove to be useful in our future careers.

What we learned

This project taught us a lot about using React effectively, working with GitHub for collaboration, and practicing agile development by sticking to familiar tools when it mattered. We also learned the importance of defining a clear scope so that we could deliver a finished product in time.

What's next for us?

Moving forward, we want to expand the platform by adding comment threads, allowing for more meaningful discussions around proposals. This would make the tool not just a voting platform, but also a space for collaboration and idea-sharing - something which is crucial for building the future of our cities. We also aimed to integrate real-time accident reporting using APIs such as Waze or TomTom, namely with the aim of allowing governments to develop insights on which road networks would be best designed for an upgrade. Another place for improvement could be the comments functionality. For example, having AI-powered reports for governments, allowing them to obtain the opinion of many people, could allow governments to make smarter, data driven decisions for the future.