Inspiration
We are tired of consuming misleading headlines about current legislation and wanted a way to stay better informed with what is going on in the legislative branch. BillHub is intended to be an all-in-one service for voters to stay more informed, for business owners to identify legislation that affects their livelihoods, and for the general public to have easy access to a representative's voting history to identify if their values are truly representative of their constituents. For future updates, this platform would have moderated civic discussion and easy-to-digest analysis, summaries, and implications for each piece of current and past legislation.
What it does
BillHub allows users to identify which representatives views align with their values the most and allows them to follow legislation that may affect their everyday lives. Users can sign up for email updates through SendGrid and in the future could sign up for real-time SMS notifications utilizing Twilio.
How we built it
We built the web app utilizing the MERN stack with a responsive frontend based on Bootstrap. Our database is populated by API calls to CivicFeed for bills and legislators and notifications to users are sent through SendGrid's API.
Challenges we ran into
Data transfer to/from MongoDB and working with varying API data structures (SendGrid/CivicFeed). Also dealing with merging conflicts since we didn't delegate tasks as efficiently as possible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Building a functional full stack application in 24 hours.
What we learned
How to utilize SendGrid and how to better interpret API documentation. More efficient ways to architect the ReactJS framework.
What's next for BillHub
Making a mobile application using a hybrid framework like Ionic 4 or React Native. Integrating Twilio for real-time text updates on legislation.
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