Context
This project was born out of the need of knowing who to vote for in my hometown. Talking with my cousins we felt there is a big gap of knowledge about politics in Mexico — people don't know who the candidates are, what the rules are, how the democratic system works, etc. This project is our starting attempt to solve those problems using web technology.
Scope
What you currently see is the MVP which I developed in about a week of my free time. My cousin Daniel and I interviewed as many candidates as we could and we gathered publicly available data to show in their profiles. The requirements for this MVP were to just have a simple set of datapoints:
- A list of their proposals
- Their team members
- An interview where we ask questions about our town
What we learned
Working in this project had a big impact on me, not only socially as a citizen but personaly in my career. It made me realize that there are problems that people have, some of which I share, that I can help to fix with my skills of web design and development. This project had a greater impact on our community then we imagined — there's a strong need for a tool like this so we want to go deeper.
Plans
We're currently working and preparing for the next elections in 2024. We want to be able to get this tool to at least every state in Mexico with at least one city per state of coverage. We also want to help people who want to educate themselves about politics in Mexico by providing an easy-to-read wiki or documentation site covering basic and common topics and questions about our country's political systems.
We have ambitious plans and we believe we'll be able to get there.
Tech
I'm also personally excited about the tools. I used Sapper to generate the static pages but in the next version I will use Elder.js which is a way better option for the scale of things we want to do. Not only that but Elder.js also provides great tools for making sure that your page is an SEO flagship.
Closing thoughts
I'll be publically documenting more about this project as we work on it. So stay tuned.