Politi-rate | Devpost

Inspiration

In today's modern world, it is imperative that citizens are aware of their local politicians and lawmakers in order to make informed decisions regarding public policies that impact their community. Especially with the strong stigma around social media and the impact politicians have through various media platforms, citizens should be aware of how their local lawmakers are behaving and being portrayed on social media.

What it does

The main functionality of our app is to analyze the tone of the most recent tweets posted by politicians and the most recent news articles concerning that politician. Our app is focused on info primarily relating to a citizen's local politicians, however they are free to view info relating to politicians from other states, as well. While going through each media source, we kept track of the overall sentiment for each politician by generating a unique score from -1 to 1, with -1 being the most negative, and 1 being the most positive. This score allows citizens to view the social media presence of and most recent actions involving their local lawmakers. The app also provides additional functionalities that provide more info about politicians such as the political party, an image of them, contact info (phone number), and providing access to and headlines of recent news articles.

How we built it

We used flutter to develop a cross-platform (android, iOS) app to display our data, which we retrieved from a back-end running NodeJS server that utilized multiple APIs, including the Phone2Action API and Twitter API. In our NodeJS server, we used a sentiment and language analysis API to analyze the tone of the most recent tweets and recent news articles concerning that politician.

Challenges we ran into

We primarily had issues moving large amounts of data across multiple different APIs and organizing our code in a way that wouldn't sacrifice speed and efficiency.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully completing the algorithm that is able to determine the unique score for each politician, and creating a decent UI design.

What we learned

We learned how to handle multiple APIs in one project, as it was the source of many errors throughout the coding process for this project.

What's next for Politi-rate

We hope to expand our app by including a larger dataset of politicians and including more relevant information regarding that politician, such as issues they support, date(s) of previous or current terms, or latest bills/legislation passed or vetoed. By providing this information to local citizens in an easy and efficient manner, we hope that citizens will make more informed decisions in the future.