Track my Leader

Twilio Sign Up Response to Subscribers

Inspiration

In a democracy, where we have the power to elect officials, we should have access to information about our leaders in an efficient, accessible and easy way. With us being in voting season and midterm elections just around the corner, we wanted to create an educational dashboard that not only educates students on voting but also sheds lights on the progress elected officials have made during their time in term.

What it does

Our dashboard webscrapes data from accredited government sites about the past three Presidents' platform and beliefs, then uses a collection of works from other resources (CDC, EPA, WhiteHouse.gov) to determine the extent to which promises made have been met through a series of data visualizations . To make the information more N.C.-specific, the same was also done for two prominent N.C Officials, Tom Thillis and Graig Meyer.

How we built it

We built our web portal using HTML/CSS, Python, and Flask. We also integrated the Twilio API to send subscribed users information about voter registration specific to their location. In the future, we would also want to inform voters about changes made to the dashboard itself.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues connecting the webscraped data and visualizations to the Flask on the frontend, especially since this was our first time webscraping data or working with Flask, but we ended up not only integrating both but also adding in the Twilio API. When we registered our domain trackmyleader.tech, we received an email about manually processing our information despite our information being correctly inputted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of integrating so much in the limited time that we had.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate APIs, webscrape data, and use Flask with HTML and CSS, all while creating an accessible, easy-to-navigate website

What's next for Track my Leader

Moving forward, we want to make our dashboard extendable by adding more elected officials, more categories, and adding in machine learning to make the category classification process more automated. Ultimately, we hope our dashboard serves as a holistic tool that equips students with the knowledge and context needed to make an educated vote.