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.
Our target users are someone who may not have a smartphone with good internet connectivity. Most of them (Women in Kenya especially) have brick phones, which have the capability of sending SMS. To build an inclusive demo, we want to handle SMS, MMS (Pictures), Video to be sent to different support groups. For now, we want to use Twitter as our primary support group and Twilio network for sharing the SMS texts, MMS, Videos via the mobile network. Every SMS sent to the registered Twilio number must be posted as a tweet on twitter account (We want to use our Women's P2P account for the final product, but for hackday we want to use a demo account) Support messages/ replies to the tweet must be sent back to the same number as SMS/MMS/Video.
We want to build a basic demo/prototype, where someone with a mobile phone (not a smartphone necessarily)
- Messages(SMS/MMS/Video) sent via Twilio must be tweeted onto the demo twitter account.
- Replies to a tweet must be sent back to the user's mobile via Twilio.
- All the rest calls related to Twilio and Twitter must be handled within the flask app.
Apart from the mobile phone support, we want to build a webclient as well, from which people can share messages/high quality videos/ Images to send it to support groups. Please have a look at the React Native client.
Skillset
- Python
- An idea on using Twilio APIs, Twitter APIs
- Flask
- Deploying server code (flask app) to Heroku
- JavaScript
- ReactJS (Webclient)
- An idea on web development
Prerequisites
- Play around with the Twilio 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
- Here's a gold for you all! Having trouble integrating Twilio into Flask app? Have a look at this blog on sending MMS via Twilio in Python