Inspiration - social media such as yik yak, twitter, and instagram are very absorbing outlets that people are looking to be distracted. The process of checking up on these apps seem so automated today. We felt it was about time to add some more value to trendy social media, an outlet for people to vent, share, and learn about the news going around their community on a local and global level. This also solves the problem of many people not being able to plow through thickly worded news articles created by professionals, it makes news accessible and effortless.
What it does - Allows people to submit a summary or opinion of an arbitrary news event of choice. You do not need an account, but you do need to submit the post with a name. There is a limit in order to keep jargon out and to facilitate understanding for the largest audience possible. There is an option to up vote, down vote, mark as spam, and automatic filter taking out posts that are excessively vulgar.
How I built it- We built it using firebase, django, html, css, and javascript.
Challenges I ran into - small things such as integrating seamlessly was difficult and took a lot of time. Two of the three team members are fairly novice so they had to learn as they went along.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of - two of the team members developed a fair bit of javascript, languages neither of them had much experience with. Using firebase to change the prioritize the posts by rating. Dynamically setting up the css for the posts to make the page flow.
What I learned - how to use firebase, two of us learned quite a bit of javascript and how to use github. It was very interesting to become accustomed to fast deployment with firebase based especially compared to traditional deployment method through amazon web services, for example. In addition, it was interesting to look into how coding can help motivate and shift society toward certain goals.
What's next for WhoNews - we really want to make staying up to date with news a prevalent thing in our society. We would like to add local, nation, world features, where people could look at different news from different places. In addition, we would like to incorporate textual analysis software to automatically detect extremely malicious, racist, and/or posts with harmful intentions. Possibly even include something similar to yakarma to motivate people to not be rude and to want to improve the WhoNews community.
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