This project was created using React and run with Yarn.

involveMe IBMernaut’s Hackathon Write-Up Elliot Murdock, Braxton Hawkins, Savannah Evans

Though our country has made tremendous strides in fighting against racial discrimination, many are still wondering if there is a way to do more. Our group believes that in order to solve issues of racial injustice, staying informed is step one. Contacting our political leaders and expressing our voice is step two. Having good intentions can only lead to improved results when our country’s political leaders are made to hear from their constituents. We wanted to design an application that reaches these goals starting at the state level, as we are often more likely to make an impact there.

involveMe confronts a problem that many Americans around the country don’t have the time or energy to solve – how to stay up to date with Congress. More specifically, involveMe helps keep Americans informed about what our statewide leaders are both saying and doing with regards to racial policy, from Juneteenth and police reform, to black commemoration and slavery reparations. In short, our application directs users to interact with an intelligent chat box designed to provide information about their state’s leaders quotes and bills on racial policy. Our application utilizes IBM Watson Assistant to provide answers quickly and concisely from data that we carefully collected from Twitter and Congress’s legislation databases.

Users are first directed to ask type in their state, and then are provided a list of their senators and representatives. From there, they can easily select any congressional leader they see and be provided details about that person and their racial policy endeavors.

Our application is admittedly limited in comparison to our ultimate goal. As it stands, our application is only implemented for congressional members from Virginia and North Carolina. Additionally, instead of autonomously scraping Twitter for quotes about racial policy, we manually searched each and every Virginian or North Carolinian politician’s Twitter feed for recent quotes. We did the same to obtain relevant legislation from Congress.gov. A more complete implementation of the application would certainly consist of a faster data collection process.