A Blueprint for Social Good

On ‘Technology for Social Good’

What does it mean to create technology for social good? Many curious students ask us that, interested in seeing why we choose this phrase for our tagline. For our first post on our Medium page, we want to discuss the meaning of Blueprint’s mission.

Founded at UC Berkeley in 2013, Blueprint was created to bridge the divide between the tech world and the social sector. Year after year, Blueprint chapters across North America hire student volunteers from their native university to build impactful software projects for the non-profit organizations situated within their local communities.

UofT Blueprint was founded in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, community meant more than ever to the UofT community, as well as the broader community in Toronto. Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of working with over 60 student volunteers from the UofT community, and as of the time of writing this article, we have just begun our fourth year as a club!

Why Technology?

There’s no denying that technology is deeply integrated with our day-to-day lives, but the question lies in, who gets to make those technologies?

For computer science students, or those in adjacent educational pathways such as engineering, a lot of time is spent on building side projects, start-up MVPs, or simply writing software for internships. Building software takes time, skill, and most importantly, money.

Organizations that rely solely on donations (i.e. “non-profits”) to run their day-to-day operations would better put all of their time, energy and resources into directly giving back to the communities that they serve. As such, technology is often gated behind for-profit organizations, creating the “gap” between the tech industry and the non-profit sector.

Blueprint aims to change that by partnering with non-profit organizations and building software for them, pro-bono. By leveraging the skills of our students at UofT, we aim to create software that can facilitate the work that our non-profit partners do, so that they can be even better at serving the communities that they aid.

This way, Blueprint benefits both non-profit organizations as well as student volunteers:

For student volunteers:

• Build meaningful projects with an end user in mind
• Experience working in a structured team consists of Product Designers, Project Developers, and Leads
• Gain technical, leadership, and management skills through different roles
• Have fun, and make friends!

For non-profit organizations:

• Gain access to a team of talented and passionate student developers to solve your technology needs
• Super charge your mission with the power of technology
• Leverage Blueprint to spread awareness of your mission in the UofT community, and inspire those who want to make a positive impact in our local community!

Redrawing UofT Blueprint

This year, we plan to rebuild UofT Blueprint from the ground up. We want to lay strong foundations for our future generations, so that the club can continue to grow and flourish after this year’s exec team moves on with their academic careers.

Since our founding, the club has gone through many ups and downs, and sometimes it has affected the greater club community. Starting this year, we want to do better as a club by enforcing a few important points:

We started by re-organizing the club structure, introducing new roles such as VP SWE, Events and External to achieve a clear separation of concern. This focuses each individual on their respective responsibilities, ensuring efficient operations.

• See how we separated responsibilities into distinct roles in this year’s UofT Blueprint Exec Role Descriptions

Our top focus for this year is to put developers and designers first. We want our developers and designers to feel that they can be heard, that they are valued, and that they can trust the Blueprint community to experiment, learn, fail, and succeed.

Currently done:

• In the executive team, emphasizing everyone’s opinions have equal weight

In the plans:

• Featuring project teams and developers and designers. More about the developers and designers, less about the executives and the leads.
• Developer spotlight through Medium articles and Instagram posts

We make sure that the executive / administration team stays connected with the club and are continually aware of what is going on in the projects and within the community. Similarly, we want everyone in the club to be aware of what’s going on in the executive team.

• An example of this would be asking our VP SWEs and VP Design to hold one-on-one meetings with the Project Leads / Designers to ensure that they are aware of what is going on within the individual teams, and how the PLs and designers are feeling.
• The President and VP hold one-on-one meetings with the other execs to ensure that they are also aware of what’s happening.
• Sending Weekly Digest on what happened last week, and what’s happening next week

We want to enforce accountability for all members of the club, especially the executive team.

• We start at the executive level by sharing the executive team’s agenda. This sets an example of how the executive is managed and how tasks are tracked. We made this agenda open to everyone for accountability and transparency.

We want to encourage iterative improvements via feedback, as well as maintain transparency. We aim to collect feedback and do retrospectives to identify places where we can do better, and improve the club based on the feedback!

• On the front page of our Blueprint notion page, we have a link to our Feedback Form, and we have already collected feedback from the VP SWEs after our first cycle of hiring to improve for the next cycle!

On top of these, we have been big on documenting processes and ensuring that there’s always a reference point for future leaders of the club to review and see what worked and what didn’t, so they can focus their time and energy on what works!

• One example of what we have done so far is the PL hub, which includes step-by-step processes for project scoping and management.

The Importance of Community

As part of our commitment to restructuring the club so that we set up our future generations for success, we want to discuss a bit about the community that we want to build within Blueprint, as well as within the greater Computer Science community at UofT.

UofT Blueprint, since its founding, has always had an amazing community within the club. Each year, we receive feedback that the members have immensely enjoyed their time in the club and have met many people that they can call mentors or friends. We aim to continue that tradition by creating more opportunities for club members to bond with each other.

Furthermore, we want to introduce the Blueprint community to the greater UofT student body, and we hope that we can hold events open to all students at UofT, including volunteer events with our partner non-profits and workshop events. This is a part of our General Membership concept, under our initiative Blueprint for Everyone which will allow more students to get to know us as a club, and generate more interest in the school community!

Future Outlook

From the hard work that the team has put into the 2023–2024 school year, we are really confident that this will be Blueprint’s best year yet. We hope that you’re just as excited as we are for the new era of UofT Blueprint — we can’t wait to show you what we have planned for this year!

Connect With Us

Do you have questions for us? Send us a message on Instagram, or email us!

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