Goose Collab

Team

a2muthu@uwaterloo.ca, gmunukut@uwaterloo.ca, f47zhu@uwaterloo.ca, j63qiu@uwaterloo.ca

Inspiration

At the University of Waterloo, students often have strong ideas but struggle to find the right collaborators to actually build them. A student in Engineering may need a designer from Arts, a business-minded teammate from AFM or Math, or a health-focused student for a wellness-related project. Right now, finding cross-disciplinary teammates is fragmented, informal, and inefficient.

Students usually rely on word of mouth, Discord servers, Instagram stories, hackathon channels, or chance encounters. This makes it difficult to:

Find teammates outside your own faculty
Assess what skills someone actually has
Discover projects that fit your interests and availability
Build balanced teams with the right combination of technical and non-technical strengths

So, we decided to find a solution for this by creating Goose Collab to act as a cross-faculty collaborator matchmaking platform for side projects involving Waterloo students.

What it does

Goose Collab is a collaboration discovery platform built specifically for Waterloo students. It allows users to create detailed profiles that highlight their program, year, skills, and previous projects while also linking external resources such as GitHub repositories, LinkedIn profiles, and resumes. By centralizing this information, the platform makes it easier for students to understand what others are capable of contributing to a team.

Students can also post project ideas and specify the skills they are looking for in potential teammates. Each project listing can include a description of the idea, required or preferred skills, the current number of team members, and the desired team size. This allows users to quickly discover projects that align with their interests or technical strengths.

In addition, Goose Collab incorporates a structured matchmaking concept inspired by systems like WaterlooWorks. Projects can differentiate between mandatory and preferred skills, allowing the platform to rank or filter collaborators based on how well their profiles match project requirements. The system also includes availability indicators so students can communicate whether they are free for long-term projects, smaller commitments, or currently busy. Together, these features help transform the process of finding collaborators from a random search into a more structured and efficient experience.

How we built it

The platform was built using a full-stack approach combining a Python backend with a modern web interface.

Frontend:

React
Tailwind CSS
Figma for UI/UX design and prototyping

Backend:

Python with Flask for server-side logic
REST-style endpoints for profile management and project handling

Database:

Firebase Firestore for storing user profiles, project listings, and availability data

Additional tooling included GitHub for version control and collaborative development.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was designing a data structure flexible enough to support profiles, project listings, and matchmaking logic while still remaining easy to query and update. We also had to figure out how to represent user availability in a way that could be used for scheduling compatibility. This required structuring availability as a weekly map rather than a simple status field. Another challenge was connecting the frontend and backend layers while maintaining clean data flow between profile forms, project listings, and Firestore documents. Finally, we spent time designing a matching and ranking system that separates mandatory and preferred skills so that users can discover the most relevant opportunities rather than just browsing randomly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to build a functional full-stack prototype of Goose Collab within a short development window. The platform successfully demonstrates the core workflow of creating user profiles, posting project ideas, and storing structured information about skills, availability, and experience. Another accomplishment was designing a flexible database schema capable of supporting both user-focused and project-focused queries. This structure lays the groundwork for future matchmaking algorithms and recommendation systems. We are also proud of the interface design and the effort put into creating a clear and intuitive layout that allows users to quickly understand how to navigate the platform.

Most importantly, we built a system that demonstrates how collaboration across faculties could be simplified and improved within the Waterloo ecosystem.

What we learned

Through building Goose Collab, we learned a great deal about structuring full-stack applications that combine frontend user interfaces with backend data systems. We gained experience integrating Flask with Firebase Firestore, designing database schemas that can support evolving features, and building interfaces that allow users to easily update and manage their profiles.

We also learned how important it is to carefully balance feature ambition with implementation time, especially when building prototypes. Planning the structure of the system early made it easier to add functionality without constantly refactoring the project. Additionally, working through challenges related to data flow between frontend forms and backend storage helped us better understand how different layers of a web application interact.

What's next for Goose Collab

There are many potential directions for expanding Goose Collab beyond its current prototype. Future versions could include a more advanced matchmaking algorithm that uses weighted skill comparisons and availability alignment to recommend collaborators or projects automatically. We are also interested in integrating AI-assisted resume parsing to extract skills and experience directly from uploaded resumes. Additional improvements could include personalized project recommendations, improved search functionality, and analytics dashboards that show collaboration trends across projects. Ultimately, the long-term goal for Goose Collab would be to deploy it as a campus-wide platform that helps Waterloo students transform ideas into real projects by connecting them with the right teammates.