conno732/civic-circle

MinneHack 2023

Civic Circle

https://devpost.com/software/civic-circle

Inspiration

Young people have historically had lower turnouts and less government participation, despite having so much more to say. Gen Z and even future generations will be impacted the most by politics at all levels, so we wanted to help give them a voice.

What it does

The objective of our project is to connect citizens to local political and social events and promote discussions around these topics. Verified coordinators of events such as city hall meetings, forums on educational policy, protests, and other civic activity can post about their events to our platforms to reach a wider audience and facilitate discussion among the public. This project is especially targeted at encouraging participation among the younger generation due to being in a format that they are familiar with.

How we built it

We built the backend using a firebase server for most of our backend needs. We configured it to handle user authentication using Firebase Auth, as well as hosting the data using FireStore for our public forum and user data.

We used angular and bootstrap to design the front end. We created modular components to provide a consistent user interface.

Challenges we ran into

We originally were trying to build the app for mobile devices, since that's the main platform to target younger audiences. However, we decided to move onto a web app, since our skills with app development were not up to the task for a 24 hour challenge. We think moving to a web app was not the best outcome, but it allowed us to spend more time working on the core functionality to deliver a minimal viable product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the amount of features that we were able to incorporate in such a short time. We are also proud of the visual consistency of our UI and how efficient we are able to complete requests.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to collaborate on a decently large project. Having to coordinate desired features between team members working on the front end and back end was an enjoyable challenge.

What's next for Civic Circle

If we were given more time an opportunity, we would want to complete and expand upon our accountability feature. Having users being able to track political events to follow up on the event’s action items would enable younger folks to improve accountability in their local politics.