Your Town Hall

A web app for people to connect and contact with their local governments and communities about events and information

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Inspiration

We were trying to think of ideas for civic engagement when we realized that we didn't even know how to contact and interact with our own local governments. We came up with the idea to have the online Town Hall where we could contact the governments.

What it does

What we have right now is more of a proof of concept than a completely functional website. Basically, the user will go to the site and they will input their zip code. The site will then access a database to find the corresponding local government and bring the user to that page. The page will have a designated forum-type interface where the person can ask questions, propose ideas, and communicate with other people in their community on a message board type system.

How we built it

The team was inexperienced in the tools needed to create a functional website with the corresponding backend code of a database, so we created a concept webpage that represents a basic front-end interface for our idea.

Challenges we ran into

We were unable to organize in a timely manner enough for us to learn the skills necessary to create a fully-functional web app. We were originally going to host the web app at domain.com with the domain name yourtownhall.org, but the site never loaded properly. We were then going to host the site with Amazon Web Services, which would have helped with the database use, but the forum aspect of the web app was blocked on Amazon Web Services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the idea that we came up with and with what we managed to create with the time and skills that we had.

What we learned

We learned about web development and began to learn about back-end systems like databases, and the code that interfaces between the front-end and back-end.

What's next for Your Town Hall

Our team is planning on continuing to work on this project after Hack AE because we feel that it is something that could be a really helpful tool for people anywhere in America. With a tool like this, Americans could easily participate more in their local government and be aware of the politics and events occuring around them.

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