Citizen ++

An app that lets you keep up with social justice issues with ease and possibly find protests, rallies, marches, or other events regarding a social justice issue.

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Inspiration

Everyone on the team is from NYC, which has a reputation for being a center of social justice activity. But for someone who is new to the social justice scene, it can be intimidating to find and scroll through numerous organizations just to keep up with a movement. So we made Citizen ++

What it does

Basically, it gets recent tweets that are relevant to the movement that's chosen and shows them to the user.

How we built it

A server using Python + Flask, and a front end using the basic web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into the challenges of generating embedded html for a twitter link. Also, getting access to the API was complicated at first. But honestly, a lot of the challenges just came from a lack of experience as it was the first time most of us even made a program with seperated front and back ends. These challenges were really trivial now that we think about it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our product's ability to scrape the twitter api successfully and return embedded html back to the user, because as stated before it was really a challenge. Or really the entire thing, because this was the biggest project

What we learned

We learned bootstrap 5, improved our html/css(especially forms) and learned flask and the twitter api.

What's next for Citizen ++

We're going to be refining the search feature to make it easier to find events instead of just news about a movement. We'll also be just cleaning up the website and making it easier to navigate. Hopefully we're going to expand our website to a lot more movements and really turn it into a newbie's guide to participation in social justice issues.

This isn't related to the project itself, but we also plan on cleaning up the code a lot (it's a hot f**king mess right now and very hard to read).

Some Notes

  • Our project is nowhere near perfect. Everything we did here is an experiment and we didn't even make something that serves it's original purpose. The twitter search is very sketchy, you get tweets from some random person on the other side of the world using the same hashtag as a social justice movement. With that said, we hope you still appreciate this project for what it is. But we plan to build this up to what it was meant to be!
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