Open Civic Tech

The Problem

Indian government portals and university websites publish critical notices — exam schedules, tenders, scholarship deadlines, fee notices — as buried PDFs with zero notification system. Citizens and students have to manually check dozens of websites every day or miss important deadlines entirely.

The Solution

Open Civic Tech is a self-hostable, fully open-source scraping and notification engine that watches public government and university portals automatically. It converts bureaucratic PDFs and HTML notices into clean, searchable RSS feeds and Telegram alerts — in real time.

How It Works

1. A YAML config file defines which websites to watch and how often

2. An async scraper visits each website on schedule, extracts notice titles and links

3. PDF attachments are downloaded and their text extracted automatically

4. New notices are stored in a database and published as RSS/Atom feeds

5. A Telegram bot notifies subscribers instantly when something new appears

Who It Helps

- Students who miss exam schedule updates and fee deadlines

- Citizens who miss government tenders and public health alerts

- Job seekers who miss UPSC/TNPSC exam notifications

- Journalists and activists tracking government decisions

Sources Tracked (MVP)

- Corporation of Chennai — public notices and tenders

- IIT Madras — academic calendar and exam schedules

Tech Stack

Python + FastAPI + BeautifulSoup4 + pdfminer.six + SQLite + feedgen + Telegram Bot — 100% FOSS licensed tools.

License

Apache-2.0