Inspiration
Citizens in America feel they don't have a voice in politics, but that is not true! I am a firm believer that if people notice something in their community that they believe needs fixing, they should be the one to make it heard. However, many people don't even know how to go by doing this. I am someone who has sent many letters to congresspeople and senators myself, and I would like to share it with other people like me who care about social justice.
What it does
This app lets you choose a topic that you are passionate about and using your location, matches you with senators or congresspeople who represent your area. From there, you have an email template that you can edit however you'd like, and finally, when your letter is finished, you can send it to your legislator.
How we built it
I used React Native and Expo to build my app. First, I created three separate screens and used a navigation component to switch between them. By creating some buttons and formatting them using lists/loops, when the user clicks a button for their issue, their location is then taken by the app and analyzed to find their zip code. I matched the zip codes with a list of representatives, and displayed them in buttons in a similar way to before. Then on the next screen, there is text input that has a pre-filled template that is editable. The text from the text-input then is saved and sent to the Mail API which then finds the representative's email, fills in the subject, and composes the letter with the text-input.
Challenges we ran into
I'm still a beginner with React Native, so navigation was tricky for me to figure out. In addition, the textInput component was also tricky to use as it was not originally multi-lined, but I wanted it to be a paragraph, so I added some styles to make it look better. Also matching the user's location with a zip code was difficult. And overall, formatting was an issue to make it look professional and pleasing to the eye.
What's next for MailIt
Implementing for more locations/countries, maybe adding something with political alignment, so the user knows if the representative is Democratic or Republican or other.
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