Presevent
#iOS development, #UI/UX design, #marketingIn 2015, right after graduation, Joe Wlos and I created Presevent—an iOS application that allowed users to track Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and across the United States to help more people participate in America's democratic process.
Driven by a desire to do social good, our goal was to promote political engagement and transparency through face-to-face democracy in the 2016 presidential election.
How does it work?
Presevent tracked Election 2016 speeches and fundraisers so that you could see presidential candidates on the trail before you saw them in the White House.
It let you see how well the candidates were doing and sent you an SMS when a candidate was in your area, so you never missed an important event.
Meet Candidates
Presevent gave you all the information you needed to see every candidate in-person.
Discover Events
Presevent sent you a notification when Election 2016 events were happening in your area.
How it’s built?
I designed and developed the Presevent iOS app. It was built entirely in Objective-C. I set up a Parse server for the backend, while Parse was still alive and well under Facebook. Meanwhile, Joe scraped the web for event data from numerous different websites. The app would check for new event data through a Parse job once a day to minimize mobile data consumption. I used Twilio to manage SMS notifications for users, so that engagement with the app wasn’t necessary for them to stay informed.
Why Presevent?
Joe and I are both believers in the power of mobile technology to broaden democratic participation. On its own, Presevent can’t change the political system. The app can’t develop policies to solve America’s most pressing challenges, from education reform to foreign policy. But Presevent can help more Americans get involved in these vitally important conversations about improving our world.
Outcomes
We won the FB Bootstrap Award which awarded us $50,000 in resources to use to continue developing and improving the app.
We were featured in this article for pioneering mobile applications.
We gathered a lot of data that we’re using to analyze the geographical movements of political candidates, and better predict the developments of Election 2020.
I made some nice business cards and we called ourselves CE[X] for a little while. We soon decided that was a little too pretentious, and we both took on the title of co-founder instead (:
Resources
Website
FLAnimatedImage
MZFormSheetController
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Twilio