Da Voice

Giving a voice to the underrepresented.

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Inspiration

In today’s world, local elections have a more direct impact on your daily life than national elections, yet many are unaware of their importance, especially within minority communities. There is a significant gap in minority representation in local government, which leads to unequal access to resources and political power. This lack of representation is worsened by the fact that most people tend to focus on national politics, not realizing how much local government shapes the services, education, safety, and daily life in their community.

What it does

Da Voice addresses this problem by providing a platform that empowers underrepresented communities to actively participate in both local and national politics. Our app focuses on offering personalized, easy-to-access information about elections and representatives relevant to your community, helping you make informed decisions. Key features include:

  • Detailed information about local and national candidates’ views, biographies, and news updates.
  • Alerts about upcoming local elections, ensuring that you don’t miss the chance to cast your vote where it matters most.
  • Guidance on how to register, where to vote, and comprehensive ballot information.
  • A wealth of resources on voting rights, local government functions, and ways to close the representation gap for minority communities.

By focusing on local elections and minority participation, Da Voice aims to empower communities to gain fair representation and build stronger, more equitable local governance through informed political engagement.

How we built it

Frontend

For the Frontend, we decided to use React with Vite, in order to create a dynamic and responsive UI. Along with Tailwind, this made it easier to start designing classes and create a consistent look throughout the site.

Backend

For the backend, we used NodeJS with Express to create the API endpoints. We mainly chose these because it was easy to implement, and looked good for scalability, and was easy to connect with the frontend.

APIs

To provide the information to the frontend, we used a variety of APIs.

  • Google Civic Information - For information about representatives and elections
  • OpenAI - To create a quick summary about the representative and their views.
  • Real Time News Data RapidAPI API - To find relevant news articles about the representative.
  • OpenStreetMap - For the map, and getting the user's current location.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we faced were handling the APIs and integrating functionality between them. For instance, getting location and the Google Civic Information API working together caused issues, requiring attention to using React's states and effect, and thinking about the overall architecture of the program. The next challenge was creating an effective and appealing UI, we needed to find the balance between displaying information, and making it still easy to understand. Last challenge was performance, as we added more and more features, api requests, and the infamy of Javascript. We needed to make sure the loading time and memory usage wasn't too much.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a ton of accomplishments we're proud of. First of all, is the overall site. Getting everything from the frontend, APIs, and backend to work together, into creating a uniform website. Also, working as a team on a big project like this is a accomplishment in it of its own. Having only 36 hours to finish this project, it is an accomplishment alone that we finished.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned more about teamwork and working in a group environment. Giving a glimpse of what working in the real world is like. We also learned more about frontend development, with learning about Tailwind and its different way of styling compared to normal CSS. We also gained more experience with handling APIs, asynchronous fetching, and state management.

What's next for Da Voice

For future features of Da Voice, we hope to introduce community features such as polls, comments, and public opinion. If we can help find like minded people together, this will create a bigger voice than they can achieve by themselves.

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