You can build realtime voting apps with MeteorJS. But should you? Is it secure?
We’ll discuss this, hear from a politician (Tom Goldenberg!) regarding software in elections, and have an interactive election live on Episode #60 of TWIM, on 10/25 at 0900hrs EST
We at Propiedata do just that, but for businesses and other organizations, all using Meteor.
Tell us more! What have you built?
TLDR: We saw an oportunity with the covid pandemic, doing virtual HOA meetings and voting and after validating the demand for the idea we built the first working product in just 3 weeks. Now we have an interesting business with more than 240k users.
Here in Colombia communities have a legal obligation to meet at least once a year, so with the covid pandemic we though that doing those meetings and voting online will be a good product to address the coming need. We did a smoke test with just some designs and a website and there was a lot of interest. After selling our first “virtual assembly” we started developing the platform for it with Meteor. We already had experience in the market and using meteor. The platform was simple, we just integrated zoom with our react frontend and added some features on top of it like speaker queues, polls, chat, and other features. You might be thinking, “this already exists on zoom”, well yes. But it was not enough to be inline with the regulations here at Colombia, like knowing who attended the meeting, who attended just a % of the time, from which ip/device did someone connected or voted, what was the property coefficient of an owner, who represents multiple units, and many other intricacies that we managed to develop along the way.
After our first succesful assembly we just exploded in new customers and so did the usage, and we were not able to scale as fast as we wanted and at somepoint that first year we had more than 35k concurrent users and everything collapsed. Our self hosted mongodb instances just couldnt manage the load. We had to work on how to scale things so that this wont happend again. I wont go into the details of it here, but it was not as dificult as we though at first, having read all those forums posts about scaling issues we though it would be an extremely hard task.
It goes on, but i might have bore everyone reading this much already.
Hi,
It could be good to share how you scaled because i think, scalability is a concern for newcomers and for choosing MeteorJS
+1. @pmogollon would be great to read more about the scaling challenge you faced and how you overcame it. Hope you’ll start a new thread and tell us the story along with any helpful tips you learned along the way. 
I did a presentation about it sometime ago, ill look for it and make a post here in the forum.
We’ve built both voting apps (like for pitch competitions) and more enterprise-y apps that political campaigns use to connect with key contacts.
There’s a big problem in the US of over-use of political text messages and advertising, so we focus on features that help campaigns do more person-to-person communication. Trying to do our part to help tone down the rhetoric and reinvigorate a sense of community.