experience
Ave Europa
Founder & Tech Lead (June 2025 –)
Website: ave-europa.eu
Overview
I founded and lead the Tech Working Group of Ave Europa, a pan-European political movement. Since June 2025, my team and I have built the organisation’s entire IT infrastructure from scratch — fully self-hosted, built on open-source tools, and owned entirely by the organisation.
Infrastructure Stack
In under a year, we architected and deployed a complete self-hosted tech stack running on infrastructure controlled by Ave Europa:
| Service | Platform | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Communications | Mattermost | Internal team messaging |
| File sharing | Nextcloud | Documents, workflows, storage |
| Version control | GitLab | Code and internal tooling |
| Video conferencing | BigBlueButton | Meetings and events |
| CRM | CiviCRM | Member and contact management |
| Password management | Vaultwarden | Credential security |
| Website | WordPress | Public-facing web presence |
| Postfix + Dovecot | Organisational email | |
| Identity | Keycloak | Single Sign-On across all platforms |
Single Sign-On with Keycloak
The most technically significant architectural decision was federating all platforms under a single identity layer using Keycloak. Each platform — Mattermost, Nextcloud, GitLab, WordPress, and others — uses a different auth mechanism: some OIDC, some SAML, some custom. Keycloak acts as the identity broker, so members across all European national chapters authenticate once and access every platform under a unified identity, with access tiers enforced centrally.
Governance Framework
Beyond the infrastructure, I authored the organisation’s full IT governance framework — independently, from scratch. This covers:
- Ownership rules and admin access tiers across the central organisation and national chapters
- Delegation models defining what each national chapter can control locally vs. what stays centralised
- Security policies: least-privilege access, Vaultwarden credential management, NDA requirements for privileged roles
- Onboarding and offboarding workflows for team members and chapter administrators
- Operations model for the internal comms team, covering identity management, platform administration, and periodic security audits
Websites
We launched Ave Europa’s main international website and initiated a rollout of national chapter websites, with the goal of deploying one per European country. Each chapter site operates under a delegated administration model defined by the governance framework.
Custom Platform Development
On the product side, I initiated and am overseeing development of two custom platforms:
- A Party Management & Membership module for managing members, chapters, and organisational structure across Europe
- A Marketing Communications module for coordinated outreach across national chapters
I also led the design and implementation of an interactive policy knowledge base — an LLM-powered frontend over a structured content graph — aimed at letting citizens across Europe engage directly with the movement’s policy positions.
Team Building
To scale the team, I developed a recruitment strategy covering internal community outreach, a dedicated Ave Europa Tech social media presence across X, LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and a structured onboarding pipeline to convert newcomers into active contributors.