This is the last assessment of the Learn.co online developer program. I chose to build an app that will encourage people to be more involved in their state legislations by providing easy access to data and a way to share that information. The idea for this application came from a realization that many of my friends do not know much about what is happening in their state legislations or even who represents them. In this age of information, I wanted to provide them a format for accessing the relevent information for the next election.
The application is built with an AngularJS frontend and Ruby on Rails API backend. The RoR backend pulls most of its data from the OpenStates.org API, but also uses a SQLite database to provide additional functionality.
The first stage of this application is to provide basic information on all the legislators throughout the United States. Users can either explore legislators by state and chamber, or search for the legislators by their home address. This search feature will be particularly useful in the future as it returns the legislators in their district that they are directly able to vote for.
Future stages will provide access to bills and voting records and the ability to explore commitees. Additionally, I hope to eventually include data regarding campaign finance and possible correlations between voting records and donations. Hopefully, by next voting season, I will have an application that can easily provide information to voters so that they can make educated decisions in the next election.