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.
In 2023, the Tech team has undertaken a big project to create a new website platform. From fall of 2023, websites of chapters will migrate to this new platform. We hope to complete this by the end of 2023.
Transparency and leading by example are very important 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 license. We chose Statamic because of its user (editor) and developer friendliness because we will keep developing new features for it.
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've built the core of our platform and enable Volt's volunteers to keep developing it further. 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 datacenters 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 you'd see with the public video platforms / social media like Youtube we're moving away from step by step. We will still use those platforms to connect to our audience on there, but are not dependent on them or force our viewers to use them to see our video content.