About TartanOne
Why this exists
Every year, a new cohort of graduate students arrives at CMU Africa from across the continent. They are sharp, driven, and immediately overwhelmed.
Not by the coursework. By everything else.
Which bus is running late today? Which restaurant near campus is actually affordable? What makes 18-631 manageable, and which course is brutal if you do not have the right background? Where is the study group forming for next week's systems exam?
The answers to these questions exist. They live in the heads of second-year students who figured it all out the hard way. But when those students graduate, the knowledge leaves with them. The next cohort starts from scratch. The same confusion, the same guesswork, the same first weeks of unnecessary friction, every single semester.
TartanOne was built to end that cycle.
What it is
TartanOne is a student-built, open-source platform designed for life at CMU Africa. It is not a university system and it is not a commercial product. It is infrastructure built by students, for students, owned by the community that uses it.
Right now it covers two things.
Survive
Everything you need to navigate Kigali in your first weeks. A live bus tracker so you know when the shuttle is actually coming. A student-verified map of the city with the places that matter: affordable food, pharmacies, SIM shops, study spots, and more. A campus events calendar that puts everything in one place. A Week 1 survival guide written by the students who came before you.
Learn
A transparent academic layer that the university does not provide. Peer reviews of courses and professors(in plans), written by students who actually took them. A study group finder. A shared resource library. Community-authored degree roadmaps that answer the question no syllabus ever does: what do I actually need to know, and in what order?
How it works, and why it does not die
Most student platforms have a short lifespan. Someone builds something, graduates, and the project disappears with them.
TartanOne is structured to prevent that.
The codebase lives on GitHub, publicly, under an open-source license. A small student group maintains it each year. When maintainers graduate, they run a structured handoff: credentials transferred, documentation written, institutional knowledge passed on. The incoming cohort inherits a living system, not a blank slate.
Every student who fixes a bug, adds a map pin, or writes a course review is contributing to something that will still be here for the students who arrive two or three years from now, students they will never meet.
That is the whole point.
Where it is going
TartanOne is currently on the first phase of the platform's vision. What exists today is the foundation: earn trust, build daily habit, prove the model.
What comes next is more ambitious. A social layer for campus discussion, club boards, and community coordination. Student club and leaders elections run through the platform. An annual hackathon where the student body proposes, builds, and votes on the features that get added next. A live GPS bus tracker wired into the fleet directly.
None of this is about replacing what already works. If a WhatsApp group or a shared spreadsheet is solving a real problem, that is fine, TartanOne is not here to compete with it. The goal is to give students a place to build the tools that do not exist yet: the ones nobody has gotten around to, the ones that need more structure than a group chat can offer, the ones that should outlast the person who first needed them.
The long-term goal is a platform that feels less like a tool students use and more like an institution students own. Something that gets better every year because every cohort that passes through it leaves it slightly more complete than they found it.
How to be part of it
If you are a student at CMU Africa: use it. Leave a course review. Add a map pin. Post a study session. The platform is only as useful as the community that feeds it.
If you want to go deeper: TartanOne is open source and actively maintained by a student group. The GitHub repository is public. There are good first issues labeled for new contributors. You do not need to be an experienced developer. Documentation updates, data corrections, design feedback, and bug reports all count.
Note: The Repo hasn't been made public yet we are looking for moderators, contributors and testers. If you want to support the work please shoot an email to contribute@tartanone.com.
If you are a returning student or alumni: the most valuable thing you can do is write a roadmap. You have walked the path. Someone is about to start it. Tell them what you know.
The platform is the sum of everyone who has contributed to it. There is always room for one more.
Built by students, for students, and every cohort that comes after.