DemocracyBot

Inspiration

This is inspired by the various american sites which do similar things, such as resist.bot . We noticed there was no such website for canadian issues, so we created democracybot.org

What it does

DemocracyBot sends a message to your representative regarding various issues, communicating with you through Facebook Messenger

How we built it

We started by reading the api documentation for Facebook messenger. Because of this great client implementation in node.js we decided on using that for the bot. As for the website, it was done in HTML with a CSS stylesheet. It's very simple and minimalistic, only showing and saying what needs to be said. It has no bitcoin miners, no ads, and is generally just super lightweight

Challenges we ran into

Well, first of all when buying the domain we went through 3 coupon codes, 2 calls to Domain.com and 1 call to my bank, and at the end of the day I couldn't update the CNAME or A Records because it didn't update. Next, when putting our scripts together, we realized that while we vaguely knew of some problems, we didn't know enough about them to properly formulate letters or summaries, which was resolved after a decent amount of research. The stylesheet was horrendously irritating to work with, between color codes not doing what we wanted them to, to the font size of the buttons not working, then working, then breaking again.

With the bot itself, we were learning the facebook API and node.js as we went along, which led to everything taking much longer than it should have. Strange javascript errors and massive lag from the facebook API led to massive frustration for the amazing and handsome man who did the backend code (this part wasn't written by him i promise)

Built With

Submitted to

MariHacks 2018
- Winner Third Place

Created by

I wrote the website, which resulted in me needing to unearth some buried HTML knowledge, as well as helping on the stylesheet.

William
I did most of the writing - writing up our mission statement, our letters to send, and issue summaries. I also did political research to understand the issues we address. I've learned more about Canadian politics and contacting representatives through this project.

Rory Liebmann
I worked on the the backend, that is to say, the bot itself. I implemented the FB Messenger API and the opennorth represent API. I learned a lot about node.js and http requests.

OneTrueBen
I made the icon, worked on the CSS stylesheet, and did some review of the text. This resulted in me relearning a decent bit of CSS, which I had not used in years.

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