TreeMail

Connecting sustainability-passionate constituents to relevant bills and drafting emails for them using OpenAI API.

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Inspiration

80% of Americans think that we need to do more to address environmental issues, yet only one third of Americans know who their representatives are! One of the most overlooked methods of environmental activism is pressuring elected officials to pass environmentally-friendly legislation. Our mission: to facilitate communication between constituents and their elected officials and to encourage civic engagement surrounding environmental issues.

What it does

Streamline the process of contacting elected representatives about sustainability issues. Users are able to discover pending environment-related bills in Congress, view all of their federally elected officials based on zip code, and obtain a customized AI-generated email template.

How we built it

TreeMail uses a stack consisting of React, Node.js, Python, and Flask. We use ProPublica API to get bill summaries and statuses, OpenAI API to generate email templates, and Google Civic Information API to get representatives.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Three of our members have never attended a hackathon, and the fourth member had only attended one prior. Even cumulatively, our team had very little background in creating web-based applications from scratch. Producing a website that was able to run with a backend was a big feat in and of itself!

What's next for TreeMail!

We hope to implement several features in the future to optimize the user experience of TreeMail.

  • Social media-esque aspect to connect passionate environmentalists with each other (e.g. upvoting pending bills or sharing certain bills with your friends).
  • OAuth2.0 API implementation to send emails directly from the web browser.
  • Expanding to more issues than sustainability!
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