Our reflections on 2020 …

Well, what can we say about 2020 …

There is something about December. While 2020 has been the most unusual of years and Christmas will be very different to what we would normally expect, it is nevertheless the time of year when everyone indulges in a teaspoon or two of nostalgia.

Despite the challenging situation, our volunteers have embraced the festive spirit in December - with virtual quizzes, Christmas challenges and reflecting on what we have achieved as a group in our eight months together. We have created a community of over 1,300 volunteers from the Scottish tech industry and worked on more than 200 projects.

There have been many highlights and things to remember, but we’d like to pick out a couple in particular.

COVID-19 Dashboard

The Scottish Tech Army began as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and brought together the skillsets of talented people across the country.  In June 2020, we set our volunteers a challenge - look at the open dataset being published by Scottish Government on the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic and come up with a way of presenting it in an interactive, accessible way that would make the data more available and more usable to people across Scotland - we called it our Homebrew Challenge.  What began as a fun challenge across multiple teams soon became a collaborative process and has now become a vital resource for providing accurate and up-to-date pandemic statistics for the public.

A description in words of our COVID-19 Dashboard would barely do justice to what a fantastic resource our team has built, it really has to be seen to get a sense of the value it offers – you can see the dashboard for yourself here.

You can learn more about the process of building the dashboard in episode seven of our podcast or in our blog post.

STA Podcast

Speaking of our podcast, almost 20 episodes in, we’re immensely proud of what we’ve built.  You only have to hear the opening notes of our intro ‘Jock’s Revenge’ by Whisky Kiss to know your ears are in for a treat.

Our first episode was a chat with Scottish Tech Army founders Alistair Forbes and Pete Jaco. In this inaugural episode they spoke about the meteoric rise of the STA, how it feels to be part of something that's having an immediate effect on those we're helping and touched on the plans and hopes for the future.

Since then, our group and the podcast have gone from strength to strength.  We’ve had volunteer highlights; we’ve heard from some of the amazing organisations we’ve collaborated with on projects and each week we learn something new about the Scottish Tech Army.

“The podcast was a surprise project for me and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a great job for someone who just loves a natter! I’ve really enjoyed working with my co-host Graham Johnston and we can both attest to the sheer pleasure it’s been to hear great stories from volunteers about what being involved with the Scottish Tech Army has meant to them as well as hearing about the impact our work has on the organisations we help.  We can’t wait for next season.”

Our podcast is available on all podcast readers or you can catch up on all our previous episodes on our website.

We’re extremely grateful this Christmas to be able to look back and know that we have played a part in helping many people and organisations across Scotland deal with the immediate impacts of the pandemic and face up to the challenge of recover and building back stronger as we move into 2021.

Scottish Tech Army co-founder Alistair Forbes said: “Obviously we had no conception at the start of 2020 of what lay ahead and no thoughts of there been such a thing as the Scottish Tech Army. When we launched the Tech Army in April 2020, we couldn’t know how it would be received and how much uptake there would be. We were delighted to see such an immediate positive response both from volunteers and organisations looking for support and it quickly became clear that our immediate motivations of using the skills of the Scottish tech community to help those on the fronts lines of COVD response and of providing meaning and purpose to those that were furloughed or out of work would be fulfilled.”

“We started this as a response initiative, with no real thoughts as to how long it would be required or would have a role to play, but as the months have gone on, we have seen that there is a long term need to support social and economic recovery and help advance the careers of those in the early stages of their professional lives in the tech sector. As a result, the Scottish Tech Army is now transforming into an enduring organisation with a long-term mission to mobilise Scotland’s tech talent for good and become the hub for tech for good activity in Scotland.”

“The most remarkable thing of all is how much we have been able to accomplish with our community of volunteers – fantastic people with a strong sense of purpose, giving freely of their time and talents to support our fellow citizens and communities and help them deal with challenges unlike anything we have faced in our lifetimes to date. I’d like to extend our very heartfelt thanks to all of them and encourage them to take pride in the tremendous contribution they have made.”