Case Study - Bioregioning Tayside
The Scottish Tech Army recently supported Bioregioning Tayside with a digital project to share the stories of their dedicated community and build connections with each other.
Bioregioning Tayside is a platform which brings people in Tayside together to build community resilience in the face of environmental issues such as global heating, animal and plant extinction, a broken economic model which fuels climate crisis and biodiversity collapse and can lead to increased social injustice and mental ill health.
Bioregioning Tayside’s website had been purchased with a ‘out of the box’ theme. They were keen to develop it to include an interactive map with pins that could show where bioregional practitioners were based and share their stories with others.
Bioregioning Tayside found out about the Scottish Tech Army by chance, having been on the same Zoom call as STA volunteer Howard Perkins. Howard persuaded Clare Cooper to apply and acted as project manager for the duration of the project.
Howard joined STA in May 2020 after seeing a post on Linkedin, he was initially unsure how best to get involved, but he soon met other volunteers via virtual activities and was encouraged by fellow volunteers Margaret Hinselwood and Jean Ferguson to take an active role in post completion support activities. Howard said: “The Bioregioning Tayside project came about through a chance meeting at the Countdown to COP26 conference. Through the chat function, I started a conversation with Marian Bruce who is involved in lots of different projects from re-wilding to tourism. This led to me meeting Clare Cooper and identifying that the Scottish Tech Army could help Bioregioning Tayside.”
Having worked on a similar interactive map project for the Scottish Tech Army, Howard thought that the code could perhaps be adapted but discovered that the platform Bioregioning Tayside already had the option of a plugin which would provide most of what they wanted to achieve. Fellow STA volunteer Freya Hirshman stepped forward to provide Wordpress expertise and was able to make the changes that were required. Howard said: “Including an overlay of the Tayside bioregion was a little fiddlier but with the help of Ryan Ciesielski we got to grips with the intricacies of Shape files and KML syntax – I got to do a bit of techy work after all.
“I didn’t even know what Bioregioning was before this project and now STA are helping Bioregioning Clyde with even more sophisticated mapping technology. The standout thing for me about STA is the breadth of connections and the diversity of projects – achieved without actually meeting anyone.”
Bioregioning Tayside has been delighted with the results and feedback from users and have plans to begin using the stories in their promotion as they continue to build a community of practice and visibility that anyone can access.
Clare said: “The project has been incredibly well organised and Howard has been on top of everything. We had great progress meetings, detailed handovers and how to videos. The standard of work across the project has been brilliant.”