The Blueprint (Page 2)

Issue 2: Fit the Job to the Team

Story of Designing BikeSpace

Civic Tech Toronto Archive

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-011 Executive Summary One person, one year, one website and 500+ pages. The art of small project scope was demonstrated by the Civic Tech Toronto Archive project. Key Insight: Small scope. One step at a time, keep making progress through the balance between work and break. One person

The Hong Kong Way

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-010 Executive Summary The Hong Kong Way was a 50-kilometer human chain across Hong Kong on August 23, 2019. It started with one anonymous post on a discussion forum. The post proposed a simple idea: people holding hands to show unity. Other users upvoted the post, copied the

Story of Hack the Divide

Once upon a time, a group of people came together for a special event called Hack the Divide...

Building to Last: Technical Decisions That Matter

Article ID: AN-LLE-2025-003 Abstract: Building community technology should focus on long-term care and stability. Good technical choices help regular community members manage and maintain the platform for years. This means using common tools, keeping designs simple, writing clear instructions anyone can follow, and testing if non-experts can handle maintenance. It

Hack the Divide

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-005 Executive Summary Hack the Divide is a virtual hackathon to tackle polarization in communities. They shared insights of logistics and importance of designing user journey with attention in details. Key Insight: The Hack the Divide team succeeded because they combined existing resources smartly. They had advantages most

Issue 1: Gathering grounds

November 2025, this issue we focused in spaces for community, explore how people build community and enable projects. This month we had 4 cases, 1 story and 1 analysis added to the knowledge base. 7 Days free trial access to all content: https://the-blueprint.ghost.io/charge7th Field Trip Civic

Challenge in formatting and Response

For the readability and consumability of the content, it should share actionable tips to ensure readers are never empty handed. For the reusability, it should separate the action and interpretation into different article and sections and the case study (field trip type article) should only share facts and observations. And

Cohesion Summit

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-004 Executive Summary This is a short behind the scene of Cohesion Summit—a project trying to bring people together to work on community projects. It is not a success story yet. It is a learning story. If you want to build something in your community but don&

Technologists for Democracy

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-003 Executive Summary This is the journey of how ordinary tech workers built a group to make sure technology helps everyone, not just big companies. If you want to start something similar in your city, this guide shows you what worked, what didn't, and what you

Tools we used

For other magazine makers

Misc

(Re)Positioning ourselves

There are a lot of interesting learning through the experience of trying to start a magazine. Question started from what is a magazine and what should be the scope? While there are benefit of making it periodic to ensure we keep making progress on collecting cases and its experience so

Field Trip

Civic Tech Waterloo Region

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-001 Executive Summary The journey of Civic Tech Waterloo Region grow, struggle, and search for purpose near Lake Ontario. This community runs quarterly pitch event for projects to find contributors and for members to learn opportunity of working on projects for following four months. Key Insight: Some members

Analysis

Getting Started Right: Planning Your Civic Tech Initiative

Article ID: AN-LLE-2025-001 Abstract: Many community technology projects start with big hopes, but most of them end too soon. This article explains why that happens and how it can be avoided. The main problem is not bad ideas or broken technology. Instead, projects fail because something was missing in its

Field Trip

Civic Tech Toronto

Case ID: CASE-LLE-2025-002 Executive Summary Civic Tech Toronto has run weekly hacknight events since 2015, it is also the only civic tech local meetup in Canada to survive the pandemic period of 2020-2023. This case study traces their journey from conception to sustained operation, revealing how intentional design choices around

Community Story

Story of Civic Dashboard

Location: Toronto, Canada A familiar frustration simmers among residents who care about their city. They know local government exists. They know decisions are being made about transit, housing, parks, and neighborhoods. But when they want to understand what's happening or participate in shaping those decisions, they encounter something

Why magazine and how we pivoted

Why Magazine: Our Evolution We chose the magazine format as a deliberate commitment to quality and consistency. Unlike a blog—which can start and stop unpredictably—a magazine signals a sustained promise to readers. But the magazine itself was never the end goal. It was the vehicle for something larger:

Editorial letter

Globally, countless community-led, self-organized projects—fueled by passion and scarce resources—collapse. Yet we do not have a reliable channel to share the lessons and prevent another collapse in the future. Lessons are wasted. This is the silence we're breaking. For decades, when we've asked "