Djangocon EU: ATLAS, case study of Django in the public sector - Georgios Poulos¶
(One of my summaries of the 2026 Djangocon EU in Athens).
Full title: ATLAS: building a zero‑budget IT service management platform with Django in the public sector.
Georgios likes Django because it inspired him to think clearly about structure, workflow and architecting real-world systems.
Projects don’t fail because of technology. They fail because workflows are not clear and because the system doesn’t show what is happening. Clarity is what you need. Meaningful metrics. Maintainability.
The area for which he build the Atlas system was IT support. IT support originally was done by email and phone calls: completely unstructured. They now support 20500 employees… The problem: scaling without a system. Who owns what? Who’s looking at what issue? The real problem was unstructured requests and lack of accountability. No visibility of the process, so you can only react.
Atlas solves it by having a central Django workflow system. The user starts with a single form they need to fill in. Simple: fewer choices, fewer mistakes. Predictablility counts for a lot in internal systems.
Workflow states are central. New/assigned/in progress/waiting/closed. Tickets move between those state based on explicit business rules. And timers to watch out for tickets being in the same state for too long: accountability. And: trust! Trust that your ticket will be handled.
Postgresql as the source of truth: tickets, state history, audit trail. Email is now only one of the interfaces, it isn’t the system anymore.
Some lessons he learned:
Prioritizing workflow modeling. You get more sustainable and effective internal systems.
The Django admin helps a lot!
Transparency and metrics: emphasise transparency and accountability.
Pragmatic approach. Django really helps here.
Question from the audience about the “zero budget” mentioned in the title: he said that at the beginning it was just himself trying to improve the process by building something with Django next to his normal work. At the beginning, there was no budget to specifically hire people for the project.
Unrelated photo explanation: a recent trip to the “Modellbundesbahn” in Germany. View from the train window, there was still snow in February.