European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) Hubs

The Challenge

Disinformation work in the EU spans universities, media outlets, and NGOs in several countries. Each hub needs a dependable public site for fact-checks, literacy material, and research, but local branding and editorial habits differ.

Coordinating builds without a shared baseline gets messy fast.

The Solution

I oversee technical delivery for hubs ATC manages, including CEDMO, EDMO Belux, GADMO, and MedDMO. WordPress stays the CMS so non-technical editors can publish without training camps. Custom themes and plugins cover EU accessibility expectations and reporting needs. Resource libraries hold fact-checks, training content, and reports in structured templates.

Technical Architecture

Distributed WordPress installs (and multisite where it fit) on Linux. Performance and uptime matter because traffic spikes follow news cycles. Security patches and backup discipline are part of the job, not a side task.

My Role & Contributions

Technical manager between engineering and hub stakeholders. Roadmap for ATC-managed properties, coordination across teams, and quality bars for performance, security, and WCAG. A big slice of the work is translation: turning policy language into deployable requirements.

Challenges & Learnings

Standardize too much and a hub revolts. Customize too much and you maintain four forks forever. We settled on a modular core with per-hub extensions. Stakeholder alignment turned out to be as important as PHP fixes on a few launches.

Impact & Results

Key regional hubs launched and stayed maintained. Traffic runs in the thousands daily on peak news days. EC-facing feedback treated the network as a meaningful piece of Europe's disinformation response, which is the outcome that actually mattered politically, not just technically.