Political Intelligence Platform for Democratic Transparency

In 2021/2022, I contributed to developing a prototype platform at Article7 that addresses the challenge of "flooding the zone" tactics in modern political communication—where overwhelming volumes of content obscure factual debate and accountability. Working as part of a startup team, I helped build a system that collected and analyzed political communications in real-time, making controversial or significant statements easily discoverable through advanced search capabilities.

The platform demonstrated how semantic search technology could help journalists and citizens navigate the increasingly fast-paced and content-heavy landscape of political communication, particularly during high-stakes events like elections where rapid response and fact-checking are crucial.

I contributed to building robust data collection pipelines that interfaced with social media APIs, implementing data validation components to ensure reliability during high-volume political events. I designed the synchronization mechanisms between the relational and vector databases, ensuring consistent data availability across both storage systems while maintaining search performance.

To support the platform's multi-language capabilities for European political contexts, I contributed to data preparation by web scraping and curating custom German training datasets, working alongside the team's data scientists who developed the embedding model architecture.

During active political campaigns, I coordinated the collection and analysis of relevant communications, creating targeted datasets around specific political actors and events. This real-time monitoring demonstrated the platform's potential to identify significant political statements and trends as they emerged, serving as a proof of concept for how such systems could support rapid response journalism and democratic accountability efforts.

I implemented comprehensive testing frameworks using pytest to ensure backend reliability and data pipeline integrity. Additionally, I contributed to the deployment infrastructure by configuring containerized services using Podman on Linux virtual machines, ensuring the system could scale effectively and support deployment of multiple specialized versions for different client requirements.

The prototype successfully demonstrated the viability of semantic search for political transparency applications. The foundational work contributed to Article7's ongoing development of democratic intelligence tools. The project highlighted both the technical possibilities and practical challenges of building real-time political monitoring systems in an evolving media landscape.

This project exemplified effective technical collaboration within a startup environment. Working alongside data scientists, content specialists, and the founder, I contributed to weekly coordination meetings while maintaining ownership of specific technical components including backend development, database architecture, and deployment systems.