Politicist

The brief

Political discussion online happens in places built for outrage. Politicist is built around structure instead: users publish stances on specific issues, back them with evidence, and see what their actual elected representatives are saying and doing.

That turns into three products wearing one interface: a social network, a civic data layer that answers “who represents this address?”, and a content pipeline that keeps the feed alive before a user’s friends show up. I led the build at our agency: a FastAPI backend, a Next.js frontend and an admin back office, all on GCP.

Calls that mattered

• The issues system: users create or adopt issues, take a stance, attach evidence, and hand moderation to the community, with merge workflows for duplicates.
• Representative lookup through the Google Civic Information API: a street address resolves to real officials from president down to house member, reconciled against our own records with fuzzy name matching.
• An ingestion pipeline on Cloud Tasks that fans out one job per source, pulling curated news feeds and representatives’ posts into the product so the feed feels alive independent of user volume.
• Real-time chat and notifications on Firestore beside Postgres, which keeps the relational and political data where it belongs.

Results

Politicist is live at politicist.com. The build ran to thousands of commits under a strict test coverage gate, and the ingestion pipeline gives a young social network the thing it needs most: a product that feels alive from day one.