Back-End Development for Voting Advice App Palumba
Find your political match in Tinder style! We had the opportunity to develop the back-end for the Palumba voting advice app, which is available across Europe in more than 30 languages and in the 27 member states in the App Store and Google Play Store.
Key facts
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Services
- Back-end development
- Connection to BunnyCDN
- Connection to Crowdin
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Technologies
- PHP
- Laravel
- Laravel Filament
- Crowdin
- Client
An Idea From Young Europeans for First-Time Voters #
Palumba EU is a network of young, committed people in the EU who have set themselves the goal of "translating" the political language in the EU-bubble into the everyday language of young people in order to encourage young voters to participate in the EU elections. The app was primarily intended to show first-time voters which parties or candidate lists best match their interests in the EU Election 2024 by simply swiping questions to the left or right. This way, young voters were easily able to find out which political representatives best match their interests.
In close collaboration with the app development agency Dribba, who implemented the app, and in close coordination with the team at Palumba, we developed the back-end for the mobile app. The app was completed and launched at the beginning of May 2024 to provide orientation in the political landscape in the final phase before the EU elections. We are delighted to have been given the opportunity to be part of this great project for more democratic participation.
Back-End: Focus on Data Management #
When developing the back-end, the focus was particularly on data management so that user responses can be reliably delivered to the front-end for evaluation. To ensure that the users' political positions could be matched to the political parties, each topic was designed as a separate axis in a multidimensional space. By assigning the users in this multidimensional space, it is possible to calculate how politically close they are to a party overall. The front-end finally retrieves this information from the back-end and provides users with a clear overview of which parties best match their answers.
It was particularly important to the team at Palumba that user privacy and data protection were given the highest priority right from the start. Therefore, the app was designed in such a way that no personally identifiable information (PII) is collected. As such, IP addresses have been fully anonymized.
Intuitive Dashboard #
To make the app easy to use in the background for the Palumba team, we developed a dashboard with Filament in which the data can be managed intuitively.
In addition, the connection to Crowdin enables the team to translate the questions and texts into all desired languages.
Available in the App Store and Google Play Store #
The app is available across Europe and in over 30 languages. Palumba can be downloaded for iOS devices from the App Store here. For Android the App is available here in the Google Play Store.
We couldn't be happier with the results. The team at bitperfect took the time to understand our needs, were always responding/solving things in less than a day, and delivered a robust solution that pushed the limit of attention to details: especially when it came to building an open-source privacy by-design tech stack that would ensure strict anonymisation of all information our app would handle. We're delighted about the work we achieved together. If tomorrow we had to do it all again, we would without hesitation :)
Palumba EU