Everything about Jinpa

Getting Started with Jinpa

Jinpa is designed so that anyone — regardless of technical background — can create a fully functional website in under two minutes. Here is exactly what happens at each step.

Connecting a Custom Domain

By default your site lives at yourusername.github.io/repo-name. If you want a proper domain like seramonastery.org, you can connect one you own. You need to buy the domain first (from a registrar like Namecheap, Google Domains, or GoDaddy — usually $10–15/year).

Step 1: Add the domain to GitHub Pages

1. Go to your repository on GitHub (e.g., github.com/yourusername/your-site)
2. Click Settings (top tab)
3. In the left sidebar, click Pages
4. Under Custom domain, type your domain (e.g., seramonastery.org)
5. Click Save
6. Check the box for Enforce HTTPS (this gives your site a padlock — secure)

Step 2: Update your domain's DNS settings

Log in to wherever you bought your domain. Find the DNS settings or DNS management section. Add the following records:

DNS changes take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours to fully propagate. Once done, your custom domain will point to your Jinpa site — with HTTPS automatically enabled.

Architecture & Design

Jinpa is built on a deliberate set of choices: use as little infrastructure as possible, depend on as few third-party services as possible, and keep websites alive permanently without recurring costs. Here is what powers it and why.

Why We Built Jinpa

Who built it

Jinpa was created by Thupten Chakrishar, a Tibetan technologist, and a small group of collaborators who believe that the digital divide is not just an economic problem — it is a cultural and historical one. Thupten and collaborators have spent months designing, architecting, and building this system from the ground up, driven by a simple observation: the Tibetan community, one of the world's most culturally rich and historically significant civilizations, is dramatically underrepresented on the internet.

The problem we are solving

The web has become the primary archive of human civilization. But participation in that archive is not equal. For a Tibetan monastery, a thangka painter, a traditional medicine practitioner, or a diaspora community organization to have a website today, they typically need either significant technical skill or money to hire developers and pay for hosting. Most have neither. The result is silence — an entire civilization's living knowledge simply absent from the internet.

The AI dimension: why this is now urgent

The stakes of this absence have grown dramatically in the last few years. The dominant AI systems shaping the world — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and dozens of others — are trained on web-crawled data. The largest of these crawls is Common Crawl, which indexes billions of web pages every few months and feeds virtually every major AI model trained today.

This means that what exists on the internet today directly determines what AI systems will "know" about the world for decades to come. When a Tibetan monastery publishes their founding history, when a thangka painter documents their technique, when a Tibetan writer shares their stories in their own words — that content enters the training data that shapes global AI knowledge. The inverse is equally true: if a community's knowledge is not documented online in a format these crawlers can read, that community risks being erased from the AI's understanding of human history.

This is not hypothetical. Researchers and communities around the world have begun talking about "data sovereignty" — the right of a people to have their history, language, and culture represented in the systems that increasingly mediate human knowledge. Jinpa is, in part, a direct response to this challenge. Every website created through Jinpa adds Tibetan voices, Tibetan stories, and Tibetan knowledge to the public web in a way that search engines and AI crawlers can read, index, and learn from.

The technology is a means to an end. The end is cultural sovereignty on the digital frontier.

Why the name "Jinpa"

Jinpa (སྦྱིན་པ་) is the Tibetan word for generosity — the first of the six paramitas, or transcendent virtues, in Buddhist practice. Everything Jinpa offers is free. That is not a business model decision — it is a values decision.

What Jinpa Needs to Grow

Jinpa has gone from concept to working prototype through months of unpaid work. What exists today is a complete, functional V1 system. What is needed now is the resources to make V1 production-ready, secure, and accessible to thousands of people. V2 is a separate, longer-term vision that only becomes relevant after V1 is stable and widely used — see the V2 Vision section below.

What has been built

The current prototype represents a substantial body of technical work, completed without institutional funding:

• A complete Astro website template with 13 core components, fully responsive and accessible
• A full-featured admin panel (~2,600 lines of vanilla JavaScript) covering all content operations
• A novel encrypted credential system using browser-native Web Crypto API (AES-256-GCM + PBKDF2)
• A four-step setup wizard with full GitHub API integration — site live in ~90 seconds
• A Cloudflare Worker OAuth proxy handling secure token exchange
• An automated GitHub Actions build and deploy pipeline
• A plugin system architecture for future extensibility

This system is, to our knowledge, the first open-source website creation platform purpose-built for the Tibetan community, and the first CMS of its kind to implement GitHub-native deployment with a zero-dependency browser admin and an encrypted vault handoff authentication pattern.

Why it is urgent

The window for shaping AI training data is not infinite. The models being trained today and in the next few years will encode a particular understanding of the world that will be very difficult to correct later. Every month without Tibetan voices on the web is a month of absence in that record. Beyond AI, the generation of elders who hold living knowledge of Tibetan traditions, medicine, art, and history is aging. Digital documentation cannot wait indefinitely.

What funding would support — V1

These are all V1 priorities: making the current system production-grade and reaching the communities it was built for. V2 development is a separate future phase that comes after V1 is stable.

Why Jinpa is a uniquely sustainable model

Unlike most technology projects targeting underserved communities, Jinpa does not create dependency on continued funding for the websites it creates. This is by design:

V2 Vision: Zero-Account Publishing

The current version of Jinpa (V1) requires every user to have a GitHub account. That is already simpler than any comparable platform — but it is still one step too many. A monk in Bylakuppe should not need to understand what GitHub is to have a website. V2 removes that requirement entirely.