Getting Community Councils online
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. At this time, a number of groups aiming to provide pandemic response support launched, including the Scottish Tech Army (STA) which was founded to offer technology services to support charities and the third sector. These services would be provided through assembling teams of skilled technology volunteers adopting agile ways of working to deliver projects.
The Improvement Service reached out to local authorities and community councils to ensure they were aware of emerging support groups like the STA and Dumfries and Galloway was one of the first to reach out to the STA to explore how the local authority could benefit from the support that the STA could offer.
The original project explored a range of technology themes including Teams, Zoom and wider tech enablement across the council. Several training sessions were delivered by the STA and online training material developed. At that time many community councils had only been operating in person meetings and materials were shared via email after meetings.
Encouraged by the success of the early work with the STA, the programme of activities with the Improvement Service moved quickly into resolving the lack of digital presence and capability amongst many community councils, focussing on the design of community council sites that could be adopted and maintained easily by members of Community Councils themselves. A small working group was assembled including Aberdeen and Dumfries and Galloway councils and a template site was co-designed with the community councils. The Community Council of Birse and Ballogie was the first to roll out the new design.
Once the design has been agreed and piloted, the STA continued to assess how a robust and scalable solution could be offered. The decision was made to utilise an open-source web platform and the design was implemented on the platform so that many community councils could be supported efficiently within a single environment, freeing the community councils from the overhead of setting up and maintaining the web presence by themselves. The STA project team piloted this platform with 6 community councils. This has gone very well, and Dumfries and Galloway Council is now keen to offer this to all the community councils in its region as a templated solution. This consistency of approach aims to make this easier for the local populations.
The STA solution aims to offer each community council the ability to build and maintain its web site as well as offering event, survey, and blog functionality to support local community. The solution will be hosted and maintained by the STA, helping to avoid the situation commonly found in Community Councils that changes in membership make it difficult to maintain and update the web site once it has been created.
We are excited to now be working with a growing number of community councils and plan to have many more sites live over the summer. If you want to learn more about this – please register your interest here.
