Everything Riga offers young people, on one map

01, Chapter

The brief

The project "Developing a digital youth work system in the municipality" is funded by the European Union. Riga needed one place where young people can quickly see what the city has for them, and where youth workers can use that information in their own work.

We won the project in an open tender. It required the Riga brand guidelines, accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA, multi-factor authentication for administrators and a site that works on the phone first, because that is where young people use it.

02, Chapter

A map that shows the city through young people's eyes

We built the map with Leaflet and OpenStreetMap, so it does not depend on licences from a paid map platform. Every place is marked with the icon of its category, and dense areas group into clusters that open up as you zoom in.

Filters narrow the places down by activity and by Riga's 58 neighbourhoods. A neighbourhood can be chosen by clicking its boundary on the map or found in a searchable list. On phones the filters open as a panel from the bottom of the screen, so the map stays in view.

The map is filled with places that young people mapped themselves in mapping workshops. We turned the workshop files into structured map data.

03, Chapter

Design, search and accessibility

We built a custom WordPress theme on the Riga brand guidelines, starting from the phone screen. Four themed sections take young people straight to the content instead of through the structure of the city council.

Search understands Latvian. It finds words in their different grammatical forms and also when someone types without diacritics. Pages can also be listened to.

The accessibility tools are part of the site, not an external plugin. Text can be enlarged up to 150%, spacing and contrast can be changed, greyscale and a more readable font can be switched on, and motion can be stopped.

05, Chapter

Security

Administrators sign in with two-factor authentication and their actions are logged. A Redis cache speeds up the pages, and cookie consent is handled by our own solution with no external service. The site runs in Docker containers behind Cloudflare. Before handover we checked it against OWASP recommendations and the requirements of Cabinet Regulation No. 445.

06, Chapter

The result

The Youth Digital Embassy has been handed over to the city and is live at jauniesuvestnieciba.lv.

• A custom-built interactive map with filters by activity and by Riga's 58 neighbourhoods.
• A design built on the Riga brand guidelines, made for the phone first.
• Accessibility tools, search that understands Latvian and pages you can listen to.
• Two-factor authentication, an activity log and a security check before handover.