In October, I worked on a legislative engagement app, Orwell, and submitted it to the Congressional App Challenge along with two Tanushes and a Winston from my school.
Problem: Only 47% of youth showed up to vote in the last election cycle
This problem seemed essential to me. Beyond my own personal interest in national + world affairs, this statistic kept me: why doesn't youth-- the group with arguably the most at stakes-- show up to vote in the country? Democracy is built upon the necessity of civic engagement!
Solution: We found that a lot of youth doesn't end up voting because a) they don't understand policy b) they don't find policy accessible or c) they don't think policy impacts them personally. In our app Orwell, we break down recent bills passed in Congress, create a "personal impact summary" by showing how bills affect someone specifically based on demographic account information, and make information accessible by creating fun quizzes and animations to the app. We also add streaks and points and a leaderboard in an attempt to gameify civic engagement.
Some cool skills I learned along the way:
*ML: I got to really deep dive into ML here and learn how to use Hugging Face models + create my own sentiment analysis pipeline. I've been wanting to do this for a while now because it is such a useful tool to have in your pocket, and Orwell finally gave me an opportunity to work with LLMs, NLP, and webscraping too.
*JS animations: making bills run across the page (our mascot for the app) was some of the most rewarding frontend work I did (along with the trumpet we played when someone logged into the app)
*Choosing a...better team (how do I put this nicely?): my team did what they could with the time they spent on it I suppose. However, I ended up heavylifting 90% of the work after coming up with the idea as well. I still remember asking Christina Asquith (Hack Club Co-Founder) how to better choose cofounders for a future venture..."choose people whose skill you can attest to, will be committed, and those you don't have a problem spending free time with." I will not forget that advice again.
*Leave more time for presentation + revision in these kinds of projects. I am so excited we got an award from all the apps in our district for this! But I definitely think that 1st prize was within reach if we just edited our video better + made some more last minute changes on the app itself...**sigh...the pain of regret** But yes, on group projects you shouldn't leave things to last minute it seems.
*Navigating government APIs + bills: I just think it was cool to see that we ended up analyzing a bill on veterans eye lenses..like these were in the weeds kinds of acts I didn't expect our Congress to actually sit down and judge which was interesting.
*Not writing spaghetti code: SO...I have a habit of writing messy code because usually I don't merge it with others. Like even at Pennapps, I was able to get away with it because I worked only on hardware and didn't REALLY merge code. But here there were just FILES and FILES so yeah. I had to clean stuff up a bit.
Also. Name inspo for our app?: We named the app "Orwell" after the scene in Animal Farm in which the animals could not read the laws on the walls anymore and gave all the power on the farm to the pigs. Social and political commentary...maybe? LOL
Overall, I loved creating Orwell, and would perhaps like to continue developing this into an actually deployable app in the future. I definitely see the problem the app is trying to solve, and I think with a few tweaks we can try making this the civic tool version of "wordle." (ambitious? maybe.)
Note: Why haven't a written a post since October? I've been...swamped with work and deprived of sleep (as another post on Athena and an upcoming one on Prototype and Mongol trials and moderating a cool AMA with the Netflix CTO will demonstrate).
Here's our demo link!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZnrEQ-w58w&list=LL
ANDDD our github link : ) [[disclaimer: some spaghetti code leftover]]: https://github.com/winstonbedwar/congapp.git
*note to self: add more UI images here
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