SenateWatch | Devpost

Home page of SenateWatch

Inspiration

We are a team of hackers who were struck by how little the average American knows about their representatives and whether their views are being truly represented. As such, we wanted to make a tool that makes it easier for the typical American to understand how their state is being represented in the Senate.

What it does

SenateWatch scrapes data from Senate.gov, compiles it in .csv files, and analyzes it to show percentage party loyalty overall and in various categories of votes (also scraped from Senate.gov).

How we built it

We used beautiful-soup and requests for scraping, processed the data with Python, and used jquery and javascript for the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We had no experience with web or front-end development; our backgrounds were largely in backend and sensor interface technology, so this was a unique challenge and something we learned a ton from.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made something that was like what we envisioned at the start of the hackathon. Even though it isn't perfect, it's still the product of our hard work and we're really proud to have made something that's helped us to learn more about our Senate!