Inspiration
The recent election and people's increased participation in politics
What it does
It lets users search for their representatives by zip code and see their previous voting patterns, write to their representatives, view upcoming bills on the floor, and view previous bills, complete with maps and charts analyzing voting patterns.
How I built it
We made python scripts to scrape xml files from the government's website, then fed that information into the Google charts API to make charts and maps and to our HTML file to appear on our website.
Challenges I ran into
Many of the APIs we were planning on using were deprecated, we were all fairly new to web programming.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Having a working product, especially because for most of us, this was our first hackathon.
What I learned
We learned a lot about xml scraping and utilizing different APIs for one product.
What's next for Votified
A lot of our features are still a work in progress, so we'd like to make sure our features are more consistent and we'd like to polish the UI. We'd also like to possibly extend our web app to apply to local governments.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.