Why we needed a Municipalities Portal and how we created ours

Who is running for my parish? And for my municipality? Who are the people on the lists of each candidacy, future councilors or deputies? What are their proposals? There is no website, no official platform, where we can get these answers.

Information about the local elections is scattered all over the internet - and often not even that. Some parties publish their programs and lists on social media, on platforms that, being private and profitable in nature, are not publicly accessible (Facebook, Instagram and other social networks); others create a website that is often difficult to find; others share municipal information on social media. offline, Such as billboards and pamphlets. Basically, each campaign does it its own way, which does nothing to help people vote in an informed way. People who want to be active voters and get involved in the places where they live, but who are blocked by the difficulty of accessing electoral information.

Access to information is also a form of lower abstention. Faced with the lack of better answers to make life easier for voters who really want to be informed, LPP came up with the idea of creating the Municipalities Portal for the Lisbon metropolitan region: a portal that would centralize electoral information in one place and make it easier to search for lists and candidate programs for the 18 municipalities and 118 parishes in Metropolitan Lisbon.

So far I've been talking about “us”, but up until this point I was just a casual consumer of LPP. Hello, my name is Gonçalo Costa and I've been living in Lisbon for 9 years, ever since I came here to study Computer Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico. I've worked at SIBS, which owns MB Way and the Multibanco network, and at Ecoceno, a startup that provided a service so that restaurants could easily adopt reusable packaging; now I'm setting up my own company.

The idea for the portal came to me through a friend, Malik. I was very enthusiastic about the idea of a platform for the elections, because I had always wanted to take part in a project that would help people to be more informed about politics, and especially one that wouldn't disappear after October 12th. What is my role? To create the platform that everyone can see today in autarquicas.lisboaparapessoas.pt.

But back to the beginning. After talking to LPP and deciding to collaborate, we started talking about how we were going to set up this project. And, as is normal with many projects, the first approach was too simple. For example, it didn't take into account that it was not only important to structure municipalities, parishes and candidates in a database, but also parties, coalitions, candidates and even electoral acts (because the idea is for this platform to remain up to date for the next elections, and backwards, with information from past elections) On the other hand, many applications have different ways of sharing the program, so it was important to have a way of showing social networks, your contacts and the PDFs that are made available.

These are just examples of situations that we didn't foresee and that we accommodated as we realized how naive we had been in our first approach.

To set up the platform, I took an initial design generated by an AI tool, Lovable, which we then adapted with LPP's colors, fonts and graphic language, to give it personality and maintain the same line. I set up the database to support all this information. I have also created a mechanism for importing the spreadsheet with the data on applications and candidates, which is being updated daily by Mário (Mario, I don't envy you the tedious job of finding all this information).

This mechanism is so that Mário, LPP's journalist and editor, can do his job well, using a tool with which he is already familiar, and I don't have to set up a whole backoffice to manage this data (which I didn't have time for if we wanted this project to be on the air in time for the elections). I put all these pieces together with the experienced PHP - yes, my favorite language that is now over 30 years old, but still supports much of the Internet that we know today.

Well, we've been walking the path and today, after spending well over 100 hours on this project, we can say that the Portal das Autárquicas is (probably) the platform that gathers the most information in Portugal about the 2025 municipal elections - despite only covering the Lisbon metropolitan area - and makes it available in a coherent and understandable way so that voters can always keep up to date.

From our extensive research, we found some great tools for viewing historical data and data on past municipal elections. Unfortunately, we didn't find any other platform that aggregates information on the candidates for the next elections.

Entering the information - I know from Mario - was and still is demanding. In addition to the scattering of information that we mentioned at the beginning and the lack of an official platform, the parties and coalitions don't make it easy. Few parties, very few, have lists of all the municipalities where they have candidates on their official websites. Other parties or coalitions have their official pages out of date, still with information from the legislative elections. Programs? Few make them available as PDFs. Lists? They're also difficult to access and we've opted to insert only the headliners (given the tight timings, we had to make choices).

Now we want to hear what you think about the Municipalities Portal. Go to autarquicas.lisboaparapessoas.pt and look for your municipality and/or parish. Tell us if you like it or not and what you would change. If you also find incomplete or wrong information, please share the correct details with us so that others can benefit from your knowledge and we can have the most coherent information possible.

Finally, if you would like to support this initiative, you can find out how to make a contribution here. As we don't use advertising to keep the platform clean and focused on what matters, the donations made will pay for the servers and the time needed to collect the data and maintain the platform itself. Mainly because we want to be here for the next local elections, continuing with the aim of making information about the candidates accessible so that more people can vote in an informed way. We even intend for this platform not to die after these elections, as is the case with so many other platforms that spring up at this time.