A FOSS United campaign mapping the proprietary software that India's public universities depend on, what it costs, and who controls it. Data comes from Right to Information (RTI) requests and community led coursework audits.
We use British English (UK spelling conventions), which is the standard form of English used in India.
The site is intentionally small and static. Data changes often and new cases get added over time, so data lives in plain text files (CSV plus a JSON Schema) and the design lives only in templates. Content authors edit CSV and Markdown, never markup. The result is a fast, accessible site with effectively no runtime JavaScript, built by Zola.
- Forum thread: https://forum.fossunited.org/t/6693
All tools are pinned in shell.nix.
nix-shell # enter the dev shell with packages
just # list tasks
just serve # live preview at http://127.0.0.1:1111
just check # full gate: data validation, linters, link and HTML checksor simply zola serve
- Edit data in
data/*.csv. Each file has a sibling*.schema.jsonthat defines its columns, allowed values, and per column styling (x-display). Add a column to both the CSV and the schema. - Edit prose in
content/*.md. Add a new case study ascontent/cases/<name>.mdwithtitle,date, anddescriptionfront matter.just import-case <file.docx> <name>converts a Google Doc export. - Refresh data from the spreadsheet with
just sync-data. - Run
just checkbefore opening a pull request. CI runs the same gate and blocks deploy if data or code fails, so bad data never ships. - Keep design in templates and CSS. Keep data in CSV and schema. Do not mix.
This project was possible thanks to friends in the FOSS United community whose brains were picked, along with the staff that worked on this.
Content and data (case studies, RTI documents, copy, CSVs) :: CC BY-SA 4.0. Reuse and remix freely, credit this project, keep derivatives equally open.
Site source code (templates, CSS, JS) :: AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE in the repo.