Hot Bills | Devpost

Swipe left or right (or use the like/dislike buttons) to look through summaries of various legislative bills.
Cards provide detailed but succinct summaries of subscribed legislative bills.
Users can subscribe to certain topics to focus on the issues that are most important to them.

Inspiration

Social issues arise because of policy failures. In the American political system, _ many people do not have the chance to meaningfully engage with policy _ because of personal and systematic limitations. We believe that by taking down the barriers to participation in local politics, we can help communities change the governmental systems that impact them the most to better realize the American Dream.

What it does

Hot Bills allows users to create an account and register with local and state governments to receive notifications of legislative actions. The app presents summarized information about each bill in terms that make sense to every one, not just lawyers and politicians. Users can choose to subscribe to only certain topics that they wish to hear more about. Hot Bills also allows users to submit approval / neutral / disapproval feedback on legislative actions that can be loaded by politicians in real time. In this way, every user has a guaranteed voice in their local government.

How we built it

On the back end, we hosted a MongoDB Atlas Database on the Google Cloud platform. The database was driven by a Flask server, hosted on a Heroku free account.

On the front end, we used React Native to create a responsive, intuitive, and beautiful user interface.

To generate sample legislative data, we used the UiPath webscraping tools.

Challenges we ran into

The UiPath learning curve is very steep, and we weren't able to achieve as much automation as we would've liked.

Linking the Flask server to the MongoDB database through Heroku was challenging, and required a lot of trial and error and long build times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully implementing a stack based on Flask, MongoDB Atlas, and the Google Cloud Platform. Learning React Native and MongoDB. Creating a interface that is sexy and quick.

What's next for Hot Bills

We would love to be able to set up a server running a UiPath webscraping workflow so that the database would be updated continuously for participating locations. Moreover, being able to send push notifications to users as legislative actions happened would help the app fully achieve its original goal.