The European Youth Parliament portal
The European Youth Parliament is a peer-to-peer educational programme for young people from across Europe. SIA Mitigate built the Member Platform its volunteers use.
The challenge
We need a new platform
The European Youth Parliament is run by young people, for young people, and is represented in 40 countries across Europe. At the heart of the organisation are regular events across the continent, and the volunteers who organise them needed a platform of their own: a place to set up events, gather participants, select teams and collect peer-to-peer evaluations once an event has ended.
SIA Mitigate has a long-term relationship with EYP - we have helped organise events before - so when the organisation approached us with an IT challenge, we were eager to help.
The previous Member Platform was built on the Drupal content management framework. For an ordinary website that would have been a reasonable choice, but EYP's processes - open calls, applications, selection panels and evaluations tied to event roles - did not fit into it, and the platform's further development was technically limited.
The solution
The result is a custom platform on Ruby on Rails with a React frontend, a GraphQL API and a Postgres database.
Features:
- Managing events and registrations
- Creating open calls to apply for the different roles at an event
- Organising selection panels that evaluate applications and see the applicants' answers, event history and earlier evaluations
- Forming teams from the selected applicants
- Automatic peer-to-peer review requests after the event ends, based on each participant's role
- Business intelligence features for the organisation.
Result
Platform now is used by more than 30 000 EYP volunteers to help them organise around 500 events yearly.
The new Member Platform replaced the Drupal site. Users were migrated, and each volunteer's profile shows their session history and the evaluations received. The platform is operated for EYP by its umbrella organisation, the Schwarzkopf Foundation, and covers registration for events, event applications, selection panels, evaluations and member profiles.
The server side is written in Ruby on Rails, with the data in Postgres, a relational database that suits the platform's many linked records: members, events, applications, panels and evaluations. The interface is a React application that talks to the server through a GraphQL API, so each screen requests exactly the data it needs and the same API can later serve other clients.
The data model and API were designed so that the organisation can add custom features later without rebuilding the core. At launch the project was planned to be published as open source, so that tech-savvy EYP volunteers could implement the features they need.
Technologies
Technologies we used to create the The European Youth Parliament portal solution:
Ruby on Rails
Backend
React JS
Frontend
GraphQL
API
PostgreSQL
Database