Bits of Good Fall 2020 Demo Day: Non-Profit and Internal Projects Showcase
On Tuesday, November 17, Bits of Good (BoG) went live on YouTube to showcase the technology solutions they built for the non-profit organizations they partnered with this year. Founded in 2017 by Rhea Chatterjee, this Georgia Tech (GT) student-run organization’s mission is to build helpful technologies that advance social impact initiatives. As BoG’s venue partner, Tech Square ATL (TSQATL) Social Club supports BoG with space for team meetings and project launch parties, before shifting everything to remote collaboration due to the pandemic.
Organized into project teams of diverse skill sets, student developers, designers, and project managers within each team work together to build software, websites, and mobile apps as solutions for the non-profit organizations.
“The main challenge for us this semester was working online,” shared Fernando Raffo Pedraza, Director of Operations of BoG. “It is especially hard because we work in teams [in order to present finished] projects by the end of the semester. A lot of difficulties came up with people having to be onboarded online, as well as fostering a community in an organization of 200 students [remotely].”
Below is a list of the non-profit organizations they partnered with this semester, organized by progress.
Completed projects as of Fall 2020:
Projects to be continued during Spring 2021:
Despite the challenges from operating remotely, BoG has grown to about 200 members (up 50 since April of this year). This semester was also the first time they had a design bootcamp as part of the individual team onboarding process. “This [design bootcamp] was something that had been in the works for quite some time,” beamed Raffo, who explained that they’ve only had developer bootcamps for newcomers in the past.
Next semester, BoG is planning to increase their focus on the overall experience for the organization, which includes diversity and process improvements for project onboarding and hand-off. Among the projects to be continued next semester are General Solution and Non-profit Portal, which are internal BoG projects that do not serve a specific non-profit organization. Unlike typical BoG projects, the idea for General Solution came from the team’s observation that multiple non-profit partners had the fundamental need to manage volunteers and track donations. Additionally, Non-profit Portal was built to help streamline the onboarding and hand-off process between BoG and non-profit clients. BoG hopes to use both General Solution and Non-profit Portal as individual foundations for different non-profit organization needs, eliminating the task of building similar solutions for multiple organizations from scratch.
“Now that we know what we can do, I think it is very important for us to do it better and better every day,” Raffo concluded. “I think this has been a great semester, and I’m sure that with everyone involved we will be able to do much more in the coming ones!”
Did You Know?
Bits of Good is the brainchild of GT alumni Rhea Chatterjee, who wanted to bring life back to GTs Humanitech initiative while studying at the university. The Bits of Good brand was then created and unveiled in March 2017 with the help of Andre Hijaouy and Anna Herrera.
What are some non-profit organizations you support? Let us know in the comments below.