The working group met for the second time — this time to discuss technology decisions and the principles by which the platform should operate. At the first meeting in July we settled "what we're building and why"; now — "exactly how".
Technology decisions for civic platforms are not a neutral choice. Each one has consequences for privacy, openness, resilience to pressure, and the cost of upkeep. We spent a whole day analyzing exactly these consequences, not comparing features.
Choosing a stack for a civic platform is a political decision disguised as a technical one. We decided to discuss it accordingly.
The main debate wasn't about specific frameworks but about how open the architecture should be. Some members insisted on open source from the start, others on closed development until the MVP with a later opening. In the end we settled on a compromise: documentation and principles are open, the code stays closed until the API stabilizes.
What we locked in from the meeting
For each point there's a separate document with the rationale and the alternatives we considered. The documents are available to working group members.
- Technology stack: Next.js + Payload CMS + PostgreSQL.
- The principle of platform independence: no hard lock-in to a specific cloud.
- The principle of verifiable history: all changes to an issue are recorded in an immutable log.
- The principle of minimal personal data: we collect only what the platform can't work without.
- The principle of a public changelog: every rule change comes with a rationale and a signature.
The next meeting is a working session on preparing the closed demo. The goal is to have an interactive prototype by January.