Grace Hopper Open Source Hackathon 2018
There is a growing global movement to increase the number of women elected to public office as a key to creating a safer, fairer, more prosperous world. But in every country, women political candidates face common challenges which create an uneven playing field with their male opponents. Frequently, women face harassment, threats, violence, and corruption, leading them to feel isolated and discouraged. This problem is compounded by other obstacles such as: lack of funds, and challenges reaching out to constituents (who are frequently illiterate or may not have access to computers). Such obstacles often make it difficult to encourage women to run for office, and if they do run, to keep them from dropping out due to these pressures.
As a way to help overcome these barriers, Women's P2P Network is creating a “toolkit” in the form of a (1) webapp and (2) android app that will connect women candidates to their local constituents as well as to each other in a supportive global community. The toolkit will also ultimately offer support services such as fundraising.
The goal of the GHC projects will be to create a scaled-down demo that will allow for iteration with women's organizations and supporters.
The Android App will enable women candidates to:
- Record and schedule posting of candidates stories.
- Send and receive messages of support
For the scaled-down web portal will:
- Stream women candidates' stories
- Enable sending and receiving, and streaming messages of support
To see how this will fit into the larger project:
Testimony / "Web Portal" https://github.com/womensp2p/GSoC-Projects/wiki/Testimony-and-Message-Web-Portal
Android App https://github.com/womensp2p/GSoC-Projects/wiki/Election-Toolkit-App
- Messages sent via Twilio must be tweeted onto Women's P2P network.
- Replies to a tweet must be sent back to the user's mobile as SMS via Twilio.
- All the rest calls related to Twilio and Twitter must be handled within the flask app.
Skillset
- Python
- An idea on using Twilio APIs, Twitter APIs
- Flask
- Deploying server code (flask app) to Heroku
Prerequisites
- Play around with the Twilio SMS APIs
- Going through Flask documentation will be really helpful
- A useful blog for deploying flask app to Heroku
- Blog post on using Twitter APIs to post a tweet
Bonus
- If the above deliverable is achieved within 5 hours of time, We would love to have a web client, from which one can send messages to Twitter anonymously. Please have a look at this.