জকসু
JnUCSU
A student union election, built in the open
An election platform for Jagannath University's central students' union. Candidates get a public profile and a written manifesto, students get a place to read them side by side and argue about them, and the whole thing is open source because a closed election site is a contradiction.
- Role
- Creator & Maintainer
- Year
- 2025
- Status
- Open source · community-built
- Focus
- Civic · Community
Before it existed
An election that only lived on Facebook
- 01
The campaign lived in comment threads
Everything a candidate said sat inside a Facebook group, buried under replies within a day and impossible to find again when it mattered.
- 02
No two candidates were comparable
Promises arrived as scattered posts and screenshots, so students had no way to read one platform against another before voting.
- 03
Nothing was on the record
A post can be edited or deleted. Without a dated, public record, there was no way to hold anyone to what they ran on.
Why it exists
জকসু, the Jagannath University Central Students' Union, went to election with its campaign living entirely inside Facebook groups. Promises were made in comment threads and lost by the next morning. Nobody could compare two candidates without scrolling for an hour, and nothing said in a post survived long enough to be held against anyone.
JnUCSU is the record that was missing. Every candidate has one page: who they are, what they are standing for, and how to reach them. Every manifesto is written down, dated and readable next to every other manifesto. A blog sits alongside it so students can write about the election properly instead of only reacting to it.
It was built by the campus rather than for it. Students wrote the code, designed the interface, ran the outreach and pushed the launch. The repository stayed public throughout, because a platform asking candidates to be transparent has to go first.
- Election cycle
- 2025Election cycle
- Open contribution
- OSSOpen contribution
- Bengali-first interface
- বাংলাBengali-first interface
The platform
What a student election gets out of it
- 01
One page per candidate
Name, year, department, the position being contested and how to reach them, all on a single public page. No screenshots, no digging through a group, no asking a friend who they are.
- 02
Manifestos in writing
Each candidate publishes what they intend to do, dated and permanent. Because every manifesto follows the same shape, students can read two of them side by side and see where they actually differ.
- 03
A blog students write in
Long-form posts about the election sit next to the candidates themselves, so campus commentary has somewhere to live that is not a reply chain. Reading is open to anyone; the argument stays in public.
- 04
Bengali first, phone first
The interface is written in the language the campus speaks and built for the mid-range Android phone most students carry. Nothing about the site assumes a laptop or a fast connection.
- 05
Open source, on purpose
The repository has been public since the first commit. Students contributed code, design, copy and outreach, and anyone can read exactly how a candidate's page is put together and stored.
Credit where it's due
This one wasn't built by a person. It was built by a campus.
Students wrote the code, designed the interface, ran the outreach and pushed the launch. The repository stayed public throughout, because a platform asking candidates to be transparent has to go first.