Last week the Scottish Tech Army was given the opportunity to be part of Data Summit 2022, the flagship event of Data Fest, organised by The Data Lab. All the members of the management team have been part of big industry events over the years, but this was the first time that we had been at one as the Scottish Tech Army.

It’s Trustees Week so I thought I tell you about my own experience as a Trustee over the last three years.

I have been a trustee for Seescape, a Fife-based charity that supports people with visual impairment, for nearly 3 years. It provides a range of services from that include home assessments, sight support services, equipment support and provision and befriending.

With significant experience of the stress faced by nurses during the COVID crisis it is great to see supportive tools and techniques emerging. Dr Kath MacDonald and Dr Caroline Dickson from Queen Margaret University (QMU) working with groups of community nurses have developed an interactive toolkit called CAKE, which makes use of creative storytelling to promote self-care and team wellbeing.

As the criticality of the coronavirus pandemic has receded, we took the decision recently to retire the COVID dashboard that was created early in the pandemic by a very committed group of volunteers in the Scottish Tech Army. The project that created the dashboard was interesting for a number of reasons and we wanted to reflect on the project, what it delivered and what we learned from it.

Not long after the Scottish Tech Army started in April 2020, we were contacted by a new organisation, Social Good Connect, a not-for-profit volunteer matching enterprise based in Dundee. They had been planning to launch their new organisation later in 2020 but, seeing the urgency of the situation as we had when forming the STA, they brought forward their plans when the lockdown started, in order to help funnel help to where it was needed.

In the first step back into the non-virtual conference world, I attended The Gathering 2022 at the SEC in Glasgow last month. This was a return to a physical space for the first time in three years for the annual third sector conference and my first time attending an event dedicated to a world I’ve only come to know since the Scottish Tech Army launched.

Over the last 18 months, one of the major projects that the Scottish Tech Army has been working on is SOLE Scotland, the online community platform designed to support the wide range of civic, business, and organisational activities in Scotland’s towns and cities. Having run a pilot in Dunbar in 2021, funding was secured from the UK Community Renewal Fund, alongside continued support from East Lothian Council, to roll the platform out across the whole of East Lothian.

The COVID pandemic forced a wholesale shift in how community level services are delivered. We saw a fundamental shift in how community level engagement could be delivered and the need for new ways of working accelerated. One example of this is the development of an easily-adopted and scalable platform to allow Community Councils to communicate with and consult the people living in their areas.

Working in collaboration, the Scottish Tech Army (STA), NatWest and GoCodeGreen have built a low carbon impact charity donation platform in support of the humanitarian crisis created by the war in Ukraine. Together we are showing how a common purpose, doing good and having sustainability at the heart of delivery is possible.

Lynsey Penny, MD of Transition Dundee, discusses the social enterprise's collaboration with STA volunteers to build a user-friendly website using Odoo. With a focus on climate action and community involvement, Transition Dundee's projects tackle food and clothing waste while raising awareness.

28th of April 2022 …

The Scottish Tech Army’s second Tech for Good Summit - our flagship event of the year … and Michael von Euw, Charlotte Canham, and Joe Cross were the team that was going to deliver it …

The second Tech for Good Summit organised by the Scottish Tech Army took place on the 28th April 2022, the second anniversary of the launch of the Scottish Tech Army itself.

This year’s Summit again gave us an opportunity to explore several areas of the developing tech for good ecosystem and provided the platform for the launch of the Tech for Good Alliance.

As a retiring biological data analyst, Alistair MacDougall, sought opportunities to volunteer in data-related roles for charities. He collaborated with Stable Life, a charity associated with a commercial riding stables, to configure a system that complied with GDPR regulations. Despite staffing challenges, he successfully prepared Stable Life to implement the new system.

Collaboration and the development and promotion of the tech for good ecosystem are key themes for us in the Scottish Tech Army. We believe that, while there are many great programmes and projects being carried out under the banner of tech for good, the landscape remains fragmented and that as a result, the impact is less than it could be.

In the face of the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Ukraine, local communities continue to mobilise to great effect. Despite the daily horror stories, there are many examples of personal efforts to help support the war efforts, groups of friends driving across Europe to deliver much needed goods and food, van owners relocating from Edinburgh to Poland to feed the queues of refugees at the Polish borders and countless other inspiring stories of people rallying to support the people of Ukraine.

We announced recently that the Scottish Tech Army is part of a consortium that will be developing a digital skills for life and work programme for care-experienced young people, supported by to funding from The Life Changes Trust Legacy Fund. Having disbursed all its funds, the Trust itself has now wound up and we tuned in to some emotional webinars reviewing the impact of the Trust over the last seven years. It’s clear that it is held in very high regard by those organisations that have worked with and benefitted from the Trust and its funds, and that the team there, led by Carole Patrick, will be sorely missed.

Bertha Yakubu who founded African Women's Group Scotland in 1994, contacted the Scottish Tech Army for help in creating an online environment to support the group’s information sharing programme as part of the supportive community for African women in Scotland. The group’s primary objective is to alleviate the isolation experienced by African women in Scotland and facilitate the exchange of valuable information. Recognising the importance of this cause, the Scottish Tech Army helped by setting up a Learning Management System (LMS). This LMS became a vital tool in providing additional support to families in need.

The invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February has sent shock waves around the world and as the effects have become apparent, we have seen a huge willingness and determination on the part of many people and organisations to do something to help in some way, especially in supporting the Ukrainians in the conflict zones and those that have left the country and are now refugees in neighbouring countries. In many ways, the reaction has been similar to what was seen in the early days of the COVID pandemic – massive impacts on large numbers of people and a similar desire to find a way to help.

Preparations are well underway to begin the next phase of our SOLE project (Supporting Our Local Economy) by engaging directly with communities across East Lothian. At the end of 2021 we secured UK Community Renewal Funding and since then we’ve been working quietly in the background getting ready with new branding, a full marketing plan and an active recruitment campaign to help build out the project team we need to make this project happen.

The day before International Women’s Day this month I the Scottish Tech Army at a lunch at the House of Lords, courtesy of OpenUK, (the organisation that promotes UK leadership and global collaboration in open technology). I was there to hear Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws QC talk about her social justice work and specifically about how she brought female Afghan judges out of the country as the Taliban moved back in.