7 months of the Scottish Tech Army
The Scottish Tech Army launched in April 2020, and this month we are celebrating our seven-month anniversary and looking back over just a few of the projects we’ve had the pleasure of being involved with.
One of the projects our team of volunteers has been involved in during this year was with Aberdeen social care charity VSA. The charity supports over 20,000 vulnerable people, many of them in care homes, in 22 locations across the North-east of Scotland. When the pandemic hit, the charity approached the Scottish Tech Army to assist in creating a simpler and more reliable inventory system to help them manage the demand and distribution of PPE across their multiple sites.
The team of volunteers led by project manager Andrew Rendle decided to go with a cloud-hosted off the shelf application that would not only meet VSA’s short-term needs but could be expanded and integrated into some of their other systems in future phases.
Deputy Chief Executive John Booth said:
“Looking after the PPE across our different sites is a big task, especially as we don’t know how long the after-effects of this crisis will go on for. What’s great about the system the Scottish Tech Army has set up is that it could be used by care providers up and down the country so that other charities and care companies might also benefit from this project.”
You can learn more about our project with VSA here
Another project we’ve been involved in during our first seven months as a group was with Young Enterprise Scotland. YES is a Glasgow-based charity that works across Scotland with pupils in primary, secondary and tertiary education to inspire and equip them with entrepreneurial skills.
Chief executive, Geoff Leask, always had a long-term strategy to move towards a more blended model of delivering services, but with COVID-19 he says he’s been able to accelerate his plans with help from the Scottish Tech Army. The team led by volunteer Cameron Butchart identified some key points to give YES some food for thought and developed a road map so they can adapt to new ways of working and have been working with them on a number of workshops to help them through this transformation process.
Geoff said: “The project has been a very positive experience for us. As an organisation we’re very entrepreneurial and like to do things quickly so it’s been refreshing to work with Scottish Tech Army volunteers who have the same mentality. There’s a lot of noise and clutter online at the moment so for the Scottish Tech Army to raise themselves above that and get such traction in the business community is a significant achievement.”
You can read more about our project with Young Enterprise Scotland here.
Our first seven months have been fantastic and packed full of highlights and we can’t wait to see what will happen next.
As we look towards 2021 and what the future holds for the Scottish Tech Army, co-founder Alistair Forbes said: “The first 7 months of the Scottish Tech Army have seen amazing efforts from the hundreds of volunteers that have signed up and the examples of projects we have cited here are really just the tip of the iceberg. Working with these organisations has given us insight into the inspiring work that these organisations do and it has been really rewarding to see how we have been able to support them as they do that. There are still many challenges that we are all facing as a result of COVID-19 and we will continue to work to provide solutions to them but we are even more excited about our longer-term mission of mobilising Scotland’s tech talent for good. We know from the response we have had from the tech community to date that there is a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm amongst the people and organisations in the sector for putting their specialist skills to use in helping communities across Scotland.”