Sweent + Skvare + the City of Daytona Beach: Partnering to Bring a Citizen Engagement App to Daytona Beach Residents
With the Notice to Proceed issued, Sweent, Skvare LLC, and the City of Daytona Beach kicked off delivery of a citizen engagement platform for Daytona Beach residents — 50 days, one codebase, three teams.
The City of Daytona Beach issued its Notice to Proceed on June 8, 2026, formally starting delivery of the City's new interactive citizen engagement platform. Three organizations are building it together: Sweent LLC as prime contractor, Skvare LLC as engineering partner, and the City of Daytona Beach IT department as client, content owner, and technical counterpart.
Who does what
Sweent LLC — prime contractor, mobile experience, program management. Sweent owns the contract, the delivery schedule, and the entire resident-facing application: the mobile build for iPhone and Android, the design implementation, app store release, accessibility, and day-to-day management of the engagement. Julian Tejera, Sweent's founder and principal architect, leads the engagement; Rita Gonzalez leads UI/UX and design systems.
Skvare LLC — platform and data engineering. Skvare is a long-standing open-source and public-sector engineering firm, and brings the platform and data expertise behind the app — the content model, the administrative tooling, and the systems that deliver notifications to residents. Gena Dellett is Skvare's principal; Mark Hanna leads technical delivery with Bryan Daniels coordinating project management and QA.
City of Daytona Beach — client, content, and platform ownership. The City's IT team sets technical direction, owns the production environment, and supplies the content that fills the app. Critically, the City owns the platform at the end — this was never built as a black box.
How three teams ship in parallel
The kickoff produced one decision that shaped everything after it: draw the ownership lines first, and agree on the seams between them before anyone writes code.
That sounds procedural, and it is — but it is also the difference between a partnership that compounds and one that spends its schedule on coordination overhead. With responsibilities and interfaces settled up front, two engineering teams in two organizations could build simultaneously instead of waiting on each other, and the City could review work continuously rather than at the end.
It also kept the City's options open. Every choice was evaluated against a simple question: after handoff, can City staff operate and extend this without calling us? That test ruled out a number of otherwise convenient shortcuts.
Building a marketing platform, not just an app
A citizen engagement app that only City developers can update is a liability. So a large share of the build went into a custom content and marketing platform for City staff — a web administration experience where non-technical users manage events, parks, points of interest, quick actions, homepage highlights, and heritage trail content. Changing what residents see does not require a developer, and it does not require an app store release.
The same platform is the City's outbound communications console: compose a message once, choose the channels, and it reaches residents who subscribed to that topic by push notification, text message, and email — with per-resident preferences and full opt-out compliance built in.
The flagship content: the Black Heritage Trail
The platform's first major content module is the Black Heritage Trail — a guided, self-paced tour of 19 historic sites across Midtown Daytona Beach, including the Mary McLeod Bethune Home and Gravesite. Each stop carries its own story content, historical media, a map pin, and a place in a chronological timeline of the city's Black history.
It is the kind of content that argues for the platform: it needs a map, it needs rich media, it needs to work for someone walking the trail with an unreliable signal, and it needs to be maintainable by City staff and community historians rather than engineers.
Fifty days
The contract carries a 50-day delivery window from the Notice to Proceed, structured into four milestones: environment and kickoff; content platform and core build; AI, notifications, and analytics; then hardening, QA, and closeout.
Fifty days is not a lot of time to ship a production municipal application to two app stores. It works because the partnership was structured for it — clear ownership boundaries, decisions made early, and an engineering partner who has delivered for the public sector before.
The technology behind it
For those curious about the toolkit: the mobile application is built with React Native and Expo in TypeScript, shipping to both the Apple App Store and Google Play from a single codebase, with releases managed through EAS. The platform behind it runs on Supabase and PostgreSQL. Resident notifications use Expo push, Twilio for text messaging on a compliant A2P 10DLC registered path, and a transactional email service. Mapping uses each platform's native maps over a managed location dataset. The content and marketing platform is a React and TypeScript application built with Vite, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui. Accessibility is built to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Sweent LLC is a Daytona Beach, Florida–based software firm and an SBA-certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and HUBZone contractor, holding GSA MAS contract 47QRAA25D0024. Skvare LLC is a US-based open-source and public-sector engineering firm. To discuss a similar engagement, contact jtejera@sweent.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sweent LLC is prime contractor and builds the mobile experience end to end. Skvare LLC is the engineering partner on the platform and data layer. The City of Daytona Beach sets direction, owns the content, and owns the finished platform.
Yes. That was a design requirement from day one. City staff manage events, parks, points of interest, trail content, and resident notifications through a purpose-built content platform, and updates reach residents without waiting on an app store review cycle.
Yes. Sweent teams with specialist partners where it strengthens delivery, and works as both prime and subcontractor. Sweent is an SDVOSB and HUBZone contractor holding GSA MAS 47QRAA25D0024 and the Florida State Term Contract for IT staff augmentation. Contact jtejera@sweent.com to discuss teaming.