Member Spotlight: Silas Tsui, VP External
Ending off our Summer 2019 Blueprint term with an interview with our VP External, Silas Tsui!
Silas is currently a 3B Computer Science student here at the University of Waterloo and our summer 2019’s VP External! We chatted with him to learn more about projects at UW Blueprint, the VP External role, and how he managed to make it his own.
A lot of people often ask how UW Blueprint finds and scopes out new projects for the organization — how long do the projects typically last? How do you measure the skill level of over 40 members when looking for new organizations to partner with? What is the process like for organizations looking to work with UW Blueprint? Whether you’re a student or a nonprofit organization looking for some tech help, we’ll cover the beginnings of the scoping process and our decision making ideologies.
What’s your current position on UW Blueprint and what drew you to apply for it?
This term, I’m the one of UW Blueprint’s 2 VP Externals. Because UW Blueprint is a relatively young club, this role has kind of evolved over the different terms. But this term is kind of interesting, because we’re finishing up a lot of projects in the club, so a large part of my role is to find new projects for the next term. This is the first part of the project development process with Blueprint. In the scoping process, usually I will find different nonprofits to cold email or reach out to past connections to warm email. From there, it’s really about understanding other non-profits and what problems they’re facing and figuring out if there is potentially a good partnership where we can build something that would be helpful for them. That’s the first part: scoping. The second part is sponsorship. We run a lot of different events throughout the term which requires funding, so one of my job’s is to find funding for the club.
Where do these new projects come from?
In the past, we’ve had a decent number of projects come from St. Paul’s Greenhouse, an organization on campus where students can get together and work to solve social and environmental problems with weekly programming and mentorship available. One of our current projects was given to us when Greenhouse reached out and said, Hey, I think our project really lines up with what UW Blueprint does. And we just said, Yeah, come join Blueprint and you can kind of lead this project. We have had several projects like this where people just say, I think this would work with blueprint. Why don’t you come on board, and then you can kind of build a team for us.
The other way that we get projects is simply by reaching out. I think one really big thing that I realized through this role is that more often than not, people are like really grateful and thankful that we’re reaching out at all! I think nonprofits in general don’t have as many resources as for-profit companies do, and so there’s a lot of things that are just nice-to-haves, or things that they didn’t realize can make them a lot more efficient, just because they’re so focused on the day to day operations. But by having conversations with people and Blueprint, they often realize, oh, if we just had this, that can make us so much more efficient.
I think one of the first things I tried was just searching like Kitchener/Waterloo nonprofits on Google just to see what turns up. There’s a lot of good content and resources out there that aims to aggregate nonprofits like this. I’ve also found that during my conversations with other nonprofits, they’ll often say, Oh, that reminds me of like this other nonprofit organization that would be interested. I realized that the nonprofit community is actually very close to each other, so you can definitely find interesting connections that way as well.
If I were a non-profit organization that needed some tech help, what’s your pitch?
I think our work really speaks for itself. A lot of nonprofits have seen some of our work with the Waterloo Wellington Children’s Groundwater Festival. From there, they just saw our design process and our mocks all the way to the finished product. I think one thing that really appeals to nonprofits is that we have this well-structured process for creating a project, following through with it and then handing it off. One big pain point often with nonprofits and tech is that people will come in and create this great product, but they won’t properly hand it off. And so they’re not able to effectively use it afterwards. Eventually, it either gets discarded, or the I guess the original group has to come back and do some more work on it.
I think one of UW Blueprint’s strengths is that we work really closely with the nonprofit throughout this whole process. So during scoping, during development, and during user testing, we’re actively working together with the nonprofits to try and build something that solves their problem. To reiterate, I would say it’s that we have a really good structured process and that we like to stay in constant communication with a nonprofit to ensure that what we’re creating has value for them.
Where can these organizations take a look at our process?
I think part of it is from reading on our website — we also have some marketing materials where they can learn about our club. We basically outline our development process, what scoping is and what you can expect from scoping. We also talk about how we operate from term to term, as well as how we communicate, how we set up project teams, how we iterate. So I think the first impression that most nonprofits get is from this marketing document. After that, it would be from our first initial scoping meeting that they would have with our current VP External. In almost all of my meetings, I think at least three quarters of them, they’ve said I’m really impressed with how structured this process is, I feel very confident that I want to work with UW Blueprint because of that. So I think that’s really one big pull for them.
How do you decide whether project is fit for Blueprint’s principles and its team members? Deciding whether or not we have the resources and the manpower — how do you evaluate that, especially given we have tons of new members joining each term?
I think you can roughly assess all the projects on two different axes. One is based on impact. So how much impact does it have on the community? This isn’t necessarily related to the number of people, you could have really good depth of impact with just a small number of people, which could turn out to be more impactful. Another thing too is that impact looks really different for different organizations. So something that could be really helpful for one organization might not necessarily seem that impactful for another. Sometimes pain points for certain organizations could seem really trivial, for example, simply helping with administrative things. It seems kind of trivial on our part, because we’re just helping them fill out forms or something like that. But really, freeing up that time for them gives them a lot more energy and resources to put into other parts of their nonprofit.
In terms of impact, we want to be directly helping people. And so sometimes the biggest impact project is one that is kind of a little bit removed. So instead of maybe directly helping a nonprofit, helping people who are helping a nonprofit do their paperwork, and by helping them do their paperwork, they have more time that they can then use towards helping people.
The second axes is technical challenge. We want a project to be difficult enough and challenging enough that it helps our members grow, because our members are also here to learn. We want to give them opportunities to do so. So we usually stray away from projects that are too simple, or projects that there already are existing tools for. At the same time, we don’t want projects to be just massive in scope, because there’s only so much time that we can put in every term, we don’t want to take on a five year project just because it’s
not a great fit. Like for something in that scope, you probably want to look at organizations with more resources. And when you hand off that many times, then you’re bound to lose information along the way. With nonprofits and the projects they pitch, I look at the technical scope and impact, so you kind of just want to maximize both of them. I don’t think there’s really a formula that you can use or even a rubric, because it’s very much a case by case basis. We’re definitely still working on refining our process.
What is one thing you aimed for this term as VP External?
I think the main thing that I wanted to do this term is to create a better process for scoping. I’ve been developer for two terms on UW Blueprint before this, so it’s been really cool to hear about scoping, and then actually end up doing it this term. I’ve been able to see some projects that are really successful and well executed, and other projects where it’s been more challenging, because there’s been some things we didn’t realize when we decided to take on those projects. I wanted to create a very structured process so that we’re able to catch all of these things when we have the right expectations when starting a project.
The first part of my term was really fleshing out this process: what does a scoping look like, what are we asking? How do we properly document this so that we get all the information we need to make a good decision on whether we should take on a project? The second thing was actually getting more projects, because we haven’t had to get projects from cold emails in quite some time, we’ve mostly just had people reach out, and that’s kind of worked out. So there is some pressure, I guess, to like, reach out and get results. And so I guess that was the second part.
Speaking from the nonprofit side, what do you think is so appealing to them about UW Blueprint?
I think a lot of nonprofits and adults in general just really love seeing students do this kind of work. Like, it’s very inspiring to them. That’s kind of a sentiment that I was told during my scoping meetings, and they’re very curious as to like why students would spend their free time doing this work. They’re like, wow, you don’t get credit for this or anything, and you don’t get paid. You’re just doing this because you want to, and they just want to support students that are doing this kind of thing. I’ve found that even if it doesn’t work out in terms of like finding a successful project, they’ll help out where they can in terms of like, oh, there’s this other nonprofit that might be of interest to you or something like that. I think it’s just like being able to support students that are doing something like this is important to them.
What sorts of projects has Blueprint had in the past, and what do you foresee for the future?
So far, we focused mostly on either web applications or mobile applications, mainly because they’re fairly easy to scope out and we know what kind what kind of impact it will have. It has been brought up before that we should take on like other stuff too, like taking on a desktop application and more data science oriented projects. In terms of a club, we want to grow as much as we can, while still like doing good work for nonprofits. Next term, actually, we’ll be taking on our first data science project. We have done more analytics oriented projects too, in the form of a web dashboard. I’d say it’s, it’s mostly been web and mobile software engineering projects, but we’re open to new ideas.
How do you deal with projects that don’t align with Blueprint’s vision?
Yeah, that part is definitely more difficult. Having a call and hearing them put themselves out there and just being really into their work and saying it would be really transformative if we could get an application that does this. It’s tough. But also, I think it’s nice to just gain that perspective. A lot of these ideas come from people that aren’t particularly experienced with tech, right? And so they’re kind of dreaming about what ideal scenario is like, If I could have anything I would want this. And so I think just getting that perspective and understanding, Oh, it’s actually very difficult to do this, or It requires so many resources. I think that helps them calibrate what to expect and what is achievable. We really encourage them that if they ever have more ideas in the future to reach out again. But I think for the most part, they’re pretty understanding of why.
Something to remember in scoping is that everybody has their blind spots and places that they’re more experienced in. I don’t have much design experience, for example. For scoping meetings, we encourage any UW Blueprint member to join in and get involved with talking to the organizations. So people with design backgrounds are encouraged to come to create a more well balanced group of people. It’s nice, because oftentimes they have their own set of questions that they’ll ask as well to the nonprofit. The way that we do things right now is I will usually have that initial meeting and from there, I’ll take those results and discuss it with different people in Blueprint and then we’ll make kind of a group call whether to move forward or not.
Blueprint is always on the hunt for new projects!
If you think you have an idea for us, feel free to reach out at info@uwblueprint.org, or check out our other projects at uwblueprint.org! We’d be happy to hear from you :)
