Consultation
Work

Vantage

Role
Founder, product and engineering
Period
2025 – 2026
Status
Live, no longer in active development
Technologies
Laravel, Vue, PostgreSQL with pgvector, OSRM, Leaflet, Azure OpenAI, Laravel Reverb

AI is changing our democracy. We need tools that let anyone compete with the big guys.

Vantage is the campaign platform I built so that a local branch run by volunteers can organise like a professional campaign: efficient routes for every volunteer, a team in sync on the doorstep, and a research briefing every morning.

1 · plan the walkevery door,no backtracking2 · knock in syncPriyaNo. 12No. 14No. 16No. 18TomNo. 12No. 14No. 16No. 18no door knocked twice3 · brief the branchThe Daily Briefready beforethe kettle boils1 · plan the walkevery door,no backtracking2 · knock in syncPriyaNo. 12No. 14No. 16No. 18TomNo. 12No. 14No. 16No. 18no door knocked twice3 · brief the branchThe Daily Briefready beforethe kettle boils
Vantage plans walking routes through every door, keeps the whole team in sync on the doorstep, and briefs the branch every morning.

Big campaigns have data teams. Local branches have spreadsheets.

Well-funded campaigns have analysts, researchers, designers and custom software. A local branch has a handful of volunteers giving up their Saturdays, juggling a canvassing app, a mapping tool, a design tool, a shared drive and several group chats.

AI is widening that gap. The organisations that can afford it are already using it to research, target and organise. I wanted to see whether the same technology could close the gap instead, taking a branch from planning all the way to the doorstep in one tool anyone can use.

What changes with Vantage

Every volunteer walks an efficient route

Point a volunteer at a patch and Vantage works out the walking order through every door, with cul-de-sacs handled as detours rather than awkward backtracks. Every UK address is built in, so there's no list to buy or upload before the first knock.

The whole team stays in sync

When five people go out together, every knock is shared with the rest of the team as it happens, so no door is knocked twice. Volunteers who prefer paper get a printable walking sheet.

Research without a research team

Every morning Vantage reads the local news for each council, ward and councillor a branch cares about, and writes a newspaper-style briefing with the lead stories and key takeaways. The kind of context that used to take a Saturday to compile is ready before the kettle boils.

Professional leaflets, done in-house

A built-in leaflet designer produces print-ready artwork, and checks it for the legally required imprint, data protection wording and accessibility before it goes to the printer.

How I built it

  • Routes people can actually walk. Distances come from a self-hosted routing engine using real footpaths, not straight lines. Addresses are grouped by street and ordered by house number, streets are ordered to minimise walking, and routes that double back are penalised.
  • National-scale data. Vantage sits on 34.7 million UK addresses combined with ward boundaries, Census 2021 data and council records. Moving the import out of the application into a bulk database load made it around 100 times faster.
  • Real-time without fragility. Doorstep updates are broadcast over WebSockets to the people assigned to that session only, and the app keeps working if the connection drops.
  • AI only where it earns its place. AI writes the daily briefing to a strict structure so it's never half-finished, and checks leaflets alongside rule-based checks. Everything else, from routing to permissions, is deterministic.

Where it is now

Over a year of development produced a working platform with over 300 commits. Vantage is still live at vantagepolitics.com, but I've stepped back from active development to focus on Spektral.

What this means for your project

Vantage put large public datasets, geospatial algorithms, real-time collaboration and carefully scoped AI into one product for non-technical volunteers. If your project needs any of those, or you need to know where AI genuinely helps and where it doesn't, I'd be glad to help. Get in touch.