Co-building a Global Alerting System with the EU

Building a global alert system against disinformation

When the EU set out to counter disinformation at scale, it needed something that didn't exist yet: a single platform where Commission teams, member-state governments, and diplomats outside the institutions could see the same signals and coordinate a response together. We helped build it — on Uptoolkit, our open-source engine.

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The problem

Disinformation travels faster than the institutions built to answer it. The Rapid Alert System (RAS) is the EU's response: one of the four pillars of the Action Plan against Disinformation, endorsed by the European Council in December 2018. Its job is to let EU institutions and member states share what they see about disinformation campaigns and coordinate how they respond — drawing on open-source information alongside input from academia, fact-checkers, online platforms, and international partners.

The technical challenge

For the first time, the system had to bring organisations outside the Commission — and diplomats across member states — into one shared platform to act on the same information. Different institutions, different constraints, one place to coordinate. Getting bodies that don't normally share a system to trust and use the same one is where most projects of this kind stall.

What we built

We help to built the web platform on Uptoolkit, our open-source toolkit — the same engine we use to stand up multi-party tools fast. Starting from open-source foundations let us move quickly without locking the institutions into a black box they couldn't audit or own.

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What the client said

Congratulations on the RAS implementation — everything went perfectly, and in emergency mode. The right calls at the right moments, blockers cleared on the fly, and flawless teamwork from the stress of a three-month deadline all the way to going live. Our first application taken from A to Z through CI/CD. Thank you for the professionalism, the quality of the work, and for keeping the good humour through the pressure.

— O. Carovis European External Action Services