DeMUCracy | Devpost

Detailed view of a post.
The post feed in dark mode.
Creating a new post; light mode.
Map view to locate relevant projects.
The iOS App.
The iOS App Overview

Inspiration

Low participation rates in elections and declining interests in in city politics are increasingly putting democracy at risk in Munich. We analyzed different ways of dealing with these issues and found that the two main elements are information and participation. With our project we aim to solve precisely these issues by bringing all stakeholders of Munich's polical sphere together on a single platform.

What it does

We provide a multiplatform app together with a server application. Users can read about current projects and ongoing discussions in their city, share their opinion and propose their own policies. The app offers additional functionality for filtering and searching for certain topics/categories and ranking according to upvotes/downvotes (public opinion). Posts can also be located on a map in a dedicated self-hosted and privacy preserving view to filter for location relevance. It works on Android and iOS. As special features, we successfully implemented dark mode and localization (support for geman and english).

How we built it

The entire project was built exclusively using JetBrains' Kotlin. The backend uses a PostgreSQL database and makes use of the exposed and ktor libraries. The frontend is a Kotlin multiplatform app featuring a Jetpack Compose UI.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had ever worked with Kotlin, so we had to start from scratch. We learned a lot about the language together with its specific features and libraries. We also suffered from sleep deprivation :D

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to set up a fully working product that already includes all the main features we intended to implement while maintaining a very harmonious team athmosphere throughout. One feature that stands out to is is the unique map view.

What we learned

We acquired many new skills. In particular, we learned how to overcome adverse and unexpected situations in the development process, how to communicate efficiently in small teams and how to present our results in a way that is simultaneously concise and appealing. We were also introduced to full-stack software engineering with Kotlin.

What's next for DeMUCracy

We believe that our project can really make a difference in Munich's society. By combining elements otherwise only present in direct democracies with transparent and swift information openly available to every citizen, we can make politics more attractive and strengthen the core of our democracy - the people.