mitentscheiden.at

Idea to Launch

Georg, a good friend of mine, is active in the SPÖ (the social democratic party of Austria). In the early summer of 2023 they were holding an internal election for the new party leader.

The Junge Generation (“young generation” in German), the youth wing of the party wanted to create an app to help people decide which of the internal candidates to vote for.

Georg asked me if I wanted to collaborate on this application and I agreed. The concept was modelled after wahlkabine.at, a political questionnaire which helps you find the party which best represents your political views.

We went from idea to launch of mitentscheiden.at in 3 weeks.

The 3 candidates all answered 42 questions via the app and the users could then answer the same questions. After finishing the questionnaire the user is shown how much they match with the 3 candidates as well as multiple pages to compare their answers with the candidates.

The launch was a big success with around ~27.000 people filling out the 42 question quiz. The app also went viral on Twitter with over 400.000+ impressions and multiple high multiple high profile people in the Austrian political bubble sharing it.

It was covered by multiple national newspapers, meme pages and the second largest tv news program of the country (ZIB 1).

A question regarding removing abortion from the criminal code resulted in a controversy. The more conservative candidate (and front-runner) Doskozil at first answered with “no” but after a backlash on social media changed his answer to “yes”.

Poll results

Before the actual election was held there was an internal poll where every party member was allowed to participate.

The results were quite close:

• Doskozil: 33.7%
• Babler: 31.5%
• Rendi-Wagner: 31.35%

After coming in last in the poll, Rendi-Wagner decided to not run for re-election.

Election results

The election was held in June and ~600 party officals voted. Initially it was announced that the more conservative candidate Doskozil won with 52% of the vote.

But a few days later it was discovered that there was a mistake in the Excel sheet used to calculate the results. The votes were flipped by accident and actually the more radical candidate Babler won.

Due to the close result it’s possible that the controversy around the abortion question could have swayed the election in Babler’s favour.

Dev Talk & YouTube Video

2 months after the launch I used the project as a case study for my first dev talk which I held at the Technical University of Vienna. I uploaded the recording to YouTube and got over 1000 views on it in a few days.

I also posted it on Reddit and Twitter and it got a good amount of traction.

I made an app which went (semi)-viral and showcased it in a talk

byu/chrcit inreactjs

Joining the organisation

I joined the party and founded the Web Task Force together with Georg Windhaber.

We are currently working on multiple web projects to campaign for the upcoming national election in September 2024 as well as the European Union elections in July.