We are a research lab working with the goal of using data, tech, design and social science to strengthen the course of civic engagements in India. We work to harness the potential of open-source movement to enable citizens to engage better with public reforms. We aim to grow data and tech capacity of governments, nonprofits, think-tanks, media houses, universities etc to enable data-driven decision making at scale.
- Single landing page, with limited information around the work we do and the solutions we build.
- Someone with no prior knowledge of CivicDataLab can guage very little about our work and offerings.
- Lack of brand identity, only the company logo was accessible with limited information on our background and values.
- Our Bandhus didn't have a place to express themselves and showcase their work on the website.
- Multiple pages dedicated to different aspects or our offerings and work with a sector level classification.
- An about page explaining our approach the the work bringing in the 4 pillars; data, tech, desing and social science.
- Project level pages to share all the resources and context for individual projects.
- Individual pages for each Bandhu where they can highlight their work, favourite quotes and select accent colours.
🖼️ Framework: Gatsby
🎨 Styling: styled-components
✏️ Content source: markdown files inside the content folder
📊 Analytics: Google
Prerequisites: NodeJS must be installed on your machine.
- Clone this repo.
- Run
npm startcommand inside the root folder of the project. - To build the website, run
npm run build. - To run the local build, run the following command:
npm run serve.
Non-technical editors can update site content (team, alumni, partners, projects, events, openings) through a browser UI at /admin/ instead of editing markdown by hand, powered by Decap CMS reading static/admin/config.yml.
In production: visit https://civicdatalab.in/admin/, sign in with your CivicDataLab Keycloak account — the same one you use for other CDL products, no GitHub account needed — then edit an entry and save. With editorial_workflow on, saving opens a PR against main for a reviewer to check before it goes live.
Sign-in and all GitHub access go through cms-auth-proxy at cms-auth.civicdatalab.in, which verifies your Keycloak token and commits on your behalf using a GitHub App. See cms-keycloak-design.md for the architecture.
Local development. The CMS talks to cms-auth-proxy in every environment, including localhost — there is no separate offline mode. The committed config.yml points at production, so switch it over first:
npm run cms:local # point config.yml at a locally-run proxy
npm run develop # site on :8000 (proxy: cd cms-auth-proxy && npm start)
npm run cms:prod # ALWAYS restore before committing
npm run cms:status # which mode am I in?cms:local reads the repo and URL from cms-auth-proxy/.env, so base_url cannot drift from the proxy's PUBLIC_URL — a mismatch there makes the login hang silently. Full walkthrough in cms-auth-proxy/README.md under Testing.
Decap's
local_backendoption is deliberately not used. On localhost it makes Decap prefer its own git proxy and skipcms-auth-proxyentirely — so a local test would silently exercise none of the real auth path. Editing markdown directly in thecontent/folder covers the offline case it was there for.
See cms-strategy.md for the overall plan and cms-keycloak-design.md for the authentication architecture.
You can find guides on how to add/update project and bandhu level info here.
The code is licensed under MIT License while the contents inside the content folder are licensed under CC-BY-4.0.