Trefle

Inspiration

We noticed a distinct lack of voter participation at the collegiate level. This is often because potential voters aren't aware of leadership candidates in their respective clubs and sometimes, don't even know when elections are taking place. For candidates, this can be very discouraging and ultimately defeats the purpose of student government. Clubs also face the challenge of member communication, especially with their leaders, as it's very hard to get contact information or even know anything beyond the surface level about these students. Even if a club has all this information present, it can sometimes be tedious finding all this information as it might be buried deep within its website. Keeping track of all the different club elections and candidates can be a pain, and students, more often than not, choose to not get into it in general. Having all this information in one place would greatly increase voter turnout and enthusiasm about elections at the recreational club level, which will hopefully translate to public office elections in the future.

What it does

Our app displays the current leadership candidates of all the various clubs that a person might be in. It will also display the elections and the candidates in the election, along with an option to actually vote. At its core, it is a platform for voting. However, the application also includes essential utilities, such as an event calendar, announcements, and we plan to implement in-app communication with all of a club's members in the future

How we built it

We used react-native for the front-end and Django with Python for the back-end. We chose Django as it has more documentation than competing back-end technologies such as flask and because it is commonly used in the industry. We used MongoDB for the database and deployed it using an EC2 server.

Challenges we ran into

• Learning all the technologies from scratch
• Connecting different tools in the environment (Front-end and Back-end)
• Outdated versions in the documentation
• Time-management
• Addressing all the complexities of the voting process

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Learning the tech stack that we were previously unfamiliar and applying it into a technological service
• Addressing an issue that we all faced

What we learned

• We learned, to a simplified extent, the process of creating and deploying an app
• We learned how to brainstorm and wireframe for a creative project
• We learned our respective tech stacks
• We got better at reading documentation
• We learned to better manage our time and expectations given a 14 week time period

What's next for Trefle

• Implement in-app communication
• Implement an application form
• Implement popular features such as a Dark Mode
• Make a corresponding website
• Scale this app to encompass public office elections as well as just collegiate ones

Built With

• django
• mongodb
• react-native