Alumni Portal

Naming note: "alumni-connect" is a placeholder repo name. The project doesn't have a final name yet.

An alumni portal for KEC — Kumaon Engineering College, now BTKIT (Bipin Tripathi Kumaon Institute of Technology) — in Dwarahat, Almora, Uttarakhand. Most people still say KEC, so the docs do too. Built by KEC students with ColoredCow as mentors.

The Problem

KEC's alumni network is fragmented. Students — especially the ones about to graduate — have no reliable way to reach alumni. Alumni who want to give back (advice, referrals, mentorship) have no reliable way in either. Both sides exist; the connection doesn't.

Three Layers

The project is built on three layers at once:

1. Solve KEC's problem. A working alumni network for KEC comes first. If it doesn't work for KEC, nothing else matters.
2. Build it as a product. Generic from day one, so it can scale to other Uttarakhand colleges and institutions where networks matter. Nothing KEC-specific gets hardcoded.
3. Build it AI-first. AI inside the product (matching, search, profile help) and AI in how we build it (agentic development). We're not building a 10-year-old piece of software with today's tools.

Think Big, Do Small

The vision is big; the steps are small. We pick one small, concrete module — most likely data collection — and ship it as a proof of concept to start the shipping cycle. Everything else grows from there.

There's precedent: ColoredCow built Yearbook, a data-collection and filtering tool for IIT Delhi, about 8–9 years ago (web + mobile data entry, hostel/branch filters). It's archived now, but its code is a starting point we can reuse. Same lesson applies here: start with the data, everything else comes after.

Current Status

Foundation phase. We're laying down docs, structure, and open questions before writing application code.

Deliberately undecided right now:

• Final project / repo name
• Tech stack — see docs/architecture.md
• V1 feature set — see docs/architecture.md and docs/research.md

Repository Structure

README.md                  # You are here
TEAM.md                    # Who owns which thread + who has contributed
artifacts/                 # Initial thinking, ideas, early requirement docs
  requirement-notes/       # Each contributor's early take on the problem & purpose
  reference/               # Prior art we learn from (e.g. ColoredCow's IIT Delhi Yearbook)
docs/
  architecture.md          # System design thinking (stack TBD)
  process.md               # How we work — SDLC, GitHub flow, weekly cadence
  best-practices.md        # Conventions, ownership norms, commit/PR hygiene
  research.md              # Open questions — data sources, integrations

Current decisions and documentation live in docs/. artifacts/ holds initial thinking, ideas, and early requirement docs — kept as-is as part of the project's record, not updated to match later decisions. The root stays clean so application code can live here later.

Team

• ColoredCow — mentors
• KEC students — the team grows as more people join

Want to Contribute?

1. Read through docs/ — start with architecture.md, then process.md.
2. Join the team channel (Google Chat) — ask any owner listed in TEAM.md to add you.
3. Pick something small. An open question from research.md is a good first thread.

You learn the project by contributing to it, not before contributing to it.