internunion

Open data on internships in Brussels — who hosts them, who pays, and whether an intern can actually afford to live here.

internunion is a self-funded, open-source project mapping the internship and traineeship ecosystem of Brussels — EU institutions, agencies, NGOs, think tanks, trade associations, consultancies and law firms — with a housing-affordability index that puts each stipend against the real cost of living in the city. Brussels first, EU-wide next.

Why

Interns are one of the beating hearts of Brussels. We arrive with hopes and then fight battles that look impossible: housing, transport, the cost of simply living here. Interns are paid, percentage-wise, below the Belgian minimum wage. This project collects the data, gives it a face through personal stories, and builds the case for fair, transparent, and collectively-bargained internship conditions.

What's here now

The homepage is a Europe choropleth — each country shaded by intern pay ÷ capital-city room rent, grey hatching where there is no legal pay floor — with city pins for coverage (Brussels live, other hubs coming soon), and the accountability ledger. Projected from a GeoJSON at build time; no library. The Brussels city dashboard (/city.html) is a Leaflet + OpenStreetMap road map (vendored in assets/vendor/): curated orgs as category-coloured pins (EU institutions in blue), with the ~3,300 EU Transparency Register orgs behind a toggle (postcode-level, approximate). Category chips + pay/status/search filters drive the map and the directory list together. build.py also generates submit, questionnaire (the instrument, published verbatim), privacy (GDPR), and about pages.

Before launch, set four things in build.py

DOMAIN (done: internunion.com), FORM_ENDPOINT (your Formspree/Tally URL for the submit form), CONTACT_EMAIL (GDPR/data-request address), and PATREON_URL. Placeholders build fine but the form won't deliver and the contact links won't work until set.

• data/countries.csv — EU-27: intern pay, capital room rent, affordability ratio, minimum wage, and the legal status of unpaid internships per country.
• data/institutions.csv — the Brussels directory: organisation, type, city, internship open?, paid?, monthly stipend, response status, address, source.
• data/SOURCES.md — the rent constant, the housing-index method, the research method box, and provenance.
• data/check.py — validates the dataset and computes the housing index.
• build.py — zero-dependency generator: turns the CSV into a static, search- and AI-discoverable site (public/) with schema.org Dataset JSON-LD, robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, and an answer-first page.
• content/blog/*.md — blog articles. Add a markdown file with title, date, summary frontmatter and it builds into /blog/<slug>.html (newest first on /blog.html). Supported markdown: headings, bold/italic/code, links, lists, blockquotes, --- rules.

Run & deploy

python3 build.py            # generates public/
cd public && python3 -m http.server 8000   # preview at localhost:8000

Railway

The repo is Railway-ready via the Dockerfile: it runs python3 build.py at build time and serves public/ on $PORT. Just create a Railway project from this GitHub repo — Railway detects the Dockerfile and deploys, no extra config. Then add internunion.com as a custom domain in Railway (Settings → Networking) and point your DNS CNAME + TXT records at it.

The canonical domain is set via DOMAIN at the top of build.py (https://internunion.com); it drives every canonical URL, the sitemap, and the JSON-LD IDs.

The response-status column

Every row starts as classified (compiled from public research, not yet verified). It becomes answered when an institution replies to our standardised questionnaire, or not answered when it doesn't. Missing data is shown, never invented. A public record of who declined to answer is itself the point.

The number

Median internship stipend in the sample: ~€1400/month. A single room in a Brussels shared flat: ~€509/month — 36% of a median stipend, before food, transport, and utilities. At the low end (€950–€1095) interns are left with €180–€325/month after the minimum cost-of-living floor.

Roadmap

• Static site rendering the directory + housing index (discoverable, crawlable, agent-readable)
• Standardised questionnaire sent to every listed organisation
• Personal stories — faces behind the data
• EU-27 affordability map (stipend vs. rent, country by country)
• Brussels budget food & drink map

Contributing

Corrections and additions welcome — especially first-hand stipend figures and internship experiences. Open an issue or a pull request against data/institutions.csv. If you're an intern in Brussels, your data point moves this forward.

Support the project: (Patreon link to be added)

Licence

This project is licensed under the MIT License — Copyright (c) 2026 Gábriel Rossi. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

• Code: MIT (see LICENSE).
• Data (data/*.csv): CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution to internunion.

Data is compiled from public sources (EU Transparency Register, EU Whoiswho, official traineeship portals) and community submissions. Figures marked classified are unverified; treat them as provisional until the linked source is confirmed.