Vote :)

Voting is vital to letting your voice be heard. When you vote, you are choosing a representative for yourself, but it can be difficult to do if you don’t know where to start. Vote :) is a web-based application which aims to increase the accessibility of voting to young Australians, by reducing information overload and becoming a comprehensive resource for all things relating to voting. It focuses on teaching young people how to make their vote truly reflect their desires for Australia. To build the web application, we considered the front-end, back-end and scraping. First, we created the mock up of the application using Figma before using React and Bootstrap to implement our mock up as an interactive website. To develop the backend, we designed a four-layer web application. The first layer follows the MVC model, which interacts with the front-end. Then we implement different services to do the business logic, like searching and storing. The left part is the data-access layer and the NoSQL databases. With all these parts, we could support finding MPs, events and policies easily. The challenges faced by our team included our team members not having experience with using React and Bootstrap. This meant that a large portion of time was spent learning rather than creating the prototype. The Hackathon time period was also set at a time where multiple group members had assignments due and others had work so less time was able to be dedicated to the project.