This is the frontend part of the Whistle app. The backend is here: https://github.com/vaMuchenje/pizza
Around the world, people are communicating through social media and the internet about incidents happening around their area. Incidents, such as ICE raids, which is information that is important to advocates and immigrants themselves. But those who need this information the most may not be able to access it. Knowledge is power and those who are unable to afford smartphones or access these services are lacking that power. Immigrants, who are in constant fear of being taken away from the homes and loved ones, are an example of those who lack this power. To give the power back to these people, we hoped to create an application which is easy to access and is capable of putting the minds of those who use it at ease.
This weekend, we developed a real-time text-messaging tool that alerts immigrants of local ICE activity, called Whistle. Whistle is a unique app because of its accessibility to anyone with a phone that is capable of sending and receiving texts. No internet access or touch screen needed
Our application focuses on the Twilio API, which is capable of sending and receiving SMS and MMS. Using these features, we are able to send users alerts about ICE-related activities in their area.
Since the Twilio API was a crucial part of the project, we tried to learn as much as we could through the use of its documentation. However, it was challenging since we were mostly unfamiliar with the API, which made it a challenge to find what we were looking for.
We're proud that we were able to develop an application capable of sending and receiving messages as well as links to maps of the locations that the user specifies.
During these last two days, we have learned more about the Twilio API and gained experience using Flask.
We hope to create a better UX without having to sacrifice accessibility. We want to make it easier for those without access to the internet to be able to subscribe to our service via text form through SMS.