VoterGuide

Hold your elected officials accountable. Vote accurately based on the issues you care about the most.

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Inspiration

A lot of people don't vote in off-season elections -- and that's a problem. Usually when a bad policy is enacted or when there is inaction from our congress, a lot of people get angry and motivated. Unfortunately, over time, we just forget.

What it does

VoterGuide makes it easy to create or track issues that matter to you. It's one way to hold your representatives accountable -- by making it easy to remember who you should support or vote against on the ballot.

Issues are closely tied to elected officials -- and as election day nears -- VoterGuide compiles a scorecard of your representatives.

How we built it

We built it using node/reactjs. We used the following API providers:

  1. PubNub and PubNub BLOCKS for our "backend"
  2. Nexmo for SMS onboarding and for Number Intelligence
  3. IBM Watson Conversation API for our text-based chat bot
  4. Esri for geocoding

Challenges we ran into

We had to punt a lot of features that you typically don't punt for a public facing app. Features like authentication were not implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a semi-functioning app in less than a day. We hope someone will be interested in the project or will choose to improve on the idea.

What we learned

We learned to use a lot of the new APIs available. It opens up a lot of possibilities and we had a good experience using all of them.

What's next for VoterGuide

Tidying up issues (auth, etc..) so we can make it public. We also want to open source it on Github.

NOTE: The demo link app has its keys stripped out so nothing will work.

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