The DemocracyBot Project

03 Feb 2019

My favorite project I ever got to work on was when three of my friends and I decided to do a hackathon just for kicks to see what we’d come up with, and we ended up creating the concept for DemocracyBot. It was a Facebook Messenger bot that, similarly to some bots that exist for American audiences, allows you to select an issue and contact your local representative in the house of commons, informing them of your opinion on the given topic. It would ask you for your home address, and would find your representative using that, and send them an email.

The main goal of the project was giving the people more of a say in what goes on in the federal government and allowing a representative’s constituents to share their opinions in an easy way. To achieve this, every issue had the option of being for or against, with us doing our best to write letters that did not betray our biases too much. We also had a website, our claim on the domain for which expired earlier this month, where we attempted to succinctly summarize each issue we were addressing, as well as linking articles where the user could read further.

We thought this sort of thing was important, and a large part of the pride in this project I have came from the fact that people around us seemed to agree. We came in 3rd place in the competition, blowing away our perception of the quality of our project. Everyone there seemed legitimately interested in where we would take the project from there and expressed a hope to see it truly go live. Sadly, after that, life came crashing down on us and we were never able to find the time to continue working on and improving the project. It is, however, still something I want to revisit someday.