NewViewsNews

Created by: Rushil Umaretiya, Christopher Arraya, Joshua Lim, and Zaeem Qureshi

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the evergrowing activism community in our country that becoming is more and more toxic every year due to closemindedness and echo chambers. This has resulted in a society that has more conflict and is less understanding of people with different opinions and political viewpoints.

NewViewsNews paves the way toward the solution to this issue by giving users a way to view articles and political arguments that are opposite to their beliefs. More people can escape their echo chambers and view other perspectives, resulting in a potentially more open-minded and understanding society.

What it does

NewViewsNews forces users to view articles and posts that differ from their political beliefs. A user must go through these steps to get started with NewViewsNews:

1. Create an account. In addition to creating an account, you can also login using an already existing Google, Github, or Facebook account.
2. Take the political compass quiz. The results of this quiz (provided by Spekr) will allow us to determine your position on the political compass. We use this data to determine which articles will show up on your home page.
3. Now you can view articles or write your own!

NewViewsNews also includes other features:

• Liking other's posts
• Providing other news articles from outside news sources sorted by political alignment
• Allowing numerous customization options for writing articles
• Allowing you to tag each article you write with the article's political alignment
• Allowing you to view your position on the political spectrum

How we built it

The web app (frontend and backend) rests on a Django framework with a postgresql database. We built it with Django, and a basic web stack (HTML, CSS, JS). The website is also hosted on Rushil's home server, at newviewsnews.crucialnet.org, and we all collaborated through GitHub repo. The website consists of two main models other than the main User, which was the user profile and each article.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of us did not have the knowledge to keep up with some of our team members, resulting in an uneven workload distribution as far as web development. This resulted in a lot of teamwork challenges, such as our progress being bottlenecked based on the presence of certain members. Also, some of us were relatively new to Git, which resulted in a learning curve and some confusion at times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. Making a website from scratch
2. Learning about Django and various aspects of web development
3. Learned/improved our skills in Python, CSS, HTML
4. Becoming more familiar with Git
5. Learned how to implement a RSS feed into a website

What we learned

We learned a lot about web development and how Django works, as well as gained experience working with Git.

What's next for NewViewsNews

In the future, NewViewsNews intends to integrate some of the widely popular textual analysis machine learning algorithms in order to determine not only the general mood of the article but a better sense of the underlying message one may be trying to convey.