Volt Europa Tech team

Transparency about our website platform

Volt has hundreds of chapters all over Europe. Each one has its own website, and most of those run on a platform built by the Volt Europa Tech team. Like most other teams, such as Communications, Community or Policy, it's run mostly by volunteers.

Transparency and leading by example are vital for Volt, so we as Tech team want to share some of the choices we made with you.

  • Our content management system is Statamic. Its source code is entirely on GitHub and a lively community of developers maintains it, but it does have a commercial licence. We chose Statamic because of its user (editor) friendliness, whilst allowing our developers access to the code to further improve the system.

  • Our programming framework is Laravel, which is the most popular open-source PHP framework with tens of thousands of developers.

  • Our development partner for the website platform is Super Interactive. They built the core of our platform and enable Volt's volunteers to continue developing. All collaboration happens in Volt's own hosted Gitlab instance maintained by our partner Flying Circus.

  • Our web servers are hosted by Digital Ocean in the EU and only in datacentres that fully run on renewable energy.

  • Our web analytics solution is Plausible. Like us, they are from Europe and have a strong focus on privacy. We happily pay for their software, with money instead of our users' data. Plausible does not use cookies or comparable technologies. This means we cannot track everyone and everything, and we like that.

  • Our video platform is Mave, who aim to provide privacy conscious and no-cookie video hosting. Of course, there are no ads nor any personalised tracking.

  • Translations and summaries on pages such as our blog articles are provided by Text Sense, whom provide summaries, simplifications, and translations for our readers using the latest LLM technologies.

  • Our DNS and CDN is Cloudflare, they provide a seamless website experience through balance loading, caching, and strong security features.

We do not share any website visitor information with platforms that don't align with our values. Rather than Google Analytics, we use Plausible. Rather than YouTube, we use Mave. Any third-party that we work or integrate with, does not store IP-addresses or any other personal information that could link back to you.

At the same time, we do understand the need to reach out to people. Not just to our members and electoral people, but also in reaching new people who haven't heard of Volt. This requires us to third-party (social) media channels.

If you prefer to follow our news without popular media platforms in between, you can subscribe to our newsletter or RSS feed.

Full disclosure, our website tech stack isn't perfect yet. With Super Interactive, we are working on migrating to a European hosting organization, opposed to Digital Ocean. Using alternatives to Cloudflare has not been feasible until now, however a few good European alternatives appear to challenge the giant that is Cloudflare, recently. You can read more context on similar projects in this article on Volt's path to digital sovereignty.