Team 13 - TownSquares

Getting the pulse of the people has never been easier - TownSquares lets you ask and answer polls for your area.

Comment

https://www.townsquares.tech

Discord Usernames: jkarbi#1190, Leland#1463, Dalton#6802

Discord Team Name: Team 13, channel team-13-text

Inspiration

Traditionally, citizens write to city counsellors or stage protests when they are unhappy with how their government is acting. Nowadays, citizens can use social media to express their opinions, but the many voices makes platforms crowded and messages can get lost.

Ever wondered if there was a better way?

That's why we built TownSquares.

What it does

TownSquares lets anyone ask their community for its opinion by creating GPS-based polls. Polls are locked to GPS coordinates and can only be answered by community members within a set radius.

Polls can be used to inspire change in a community by making the voice of the people heard loud and clear. Not happy with how a city service is being delivered in your community? Post a poll on TownSquares and see if your neighbours agree. Then use the results to get the attention of your representatives in government!

How we built it

Tech stack: MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, Node.js).

Mapbox API used to display a map and the poll locations.

Backend deployed on Google Cloud using App Engine.

MongoDB running as a shared cluster on MongoDB Atlas.

Challenges we ran into

Deploying the app on GCP and mapping to a custom domain name.

Working with Angular, since we had limited frontend development experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came into this hackathon with a plan for what we were going to build and which components of the project we would all be responsible for. That really set us up for sucess, and is something we are really proud of!

What we learned

Deployment using GCP App Engine and mapping to custom domain names, integrating with Mapbox, and frontend development with Angular!

What's next for TownSquares

We hope to continue working on this following the hackathon because we think it could really be popular!! We know there's more for us to build and we're excited to do that :).

Share this project:

Updates