Baby steps 20+, a Falkirk-based charity, was established in 2020 to provide a recycling and upcycling service for baby goods, offering paid employment to local people with special needs. It enlisted the help of the Scottish Tech Army in order to help promote the social enterprise by developing an online community shop selling pre-loved baby and toddler items.

At our third Tech for Good Summit on 20th April we were delighted to welcome Philanthropy expert, Rhodri Davies to deliver our morning keynote presentation. In a wide-ranging talk, Rhodri set the context of the many challenges facing the charity sector post pandemic. In many ways the sector is facing a perfect storm of reduced financial reserves, shrinking income, higher wage bills and energy costs, all happening at the same time as a big increase in demand for the services and help it provides.

ISEE’s Journey to Establishing a Digital Presence with the Scottish Tech Army’s Expertise. As a new charitable organisation, ISEE is dedicated to achieving its mission of raising awareness of Irlen Syndrome. Irlen syndrome is a difficulty with visual perceptual processing and is not an 'eye' problem. A key part of the charity’s strategy is establishing a digital presence to help raise awareness.

Sally Coulthard, former Army Officer and founder of the Defence Gardens Scheme, shares her experience working with the Scottish Tech Army (STA) to establish their website and meet legal requirements. Volunteers Lauren Kennedy and Jason Wan provided invaluable support with website structuring, search engine optimisation, privacy notices, GDPR compliance, newsletter setup, and social media channels. The assistance received from the volunteers made a significant difference in setting up a professional showcase for the Defence Garden Scheme and proved to be an excellent communication vehicle.

Changes is a community health project in East Lothian, which works to help people in the county achieve and maintain positive mental health and wellbeing. In this video, CEO Caitlin Rodgers talks about the contributions of Scottish Tech Army volunteers across a range of activities, which resulted in more financial support from local businesses, more requests for support from younger people and greater confidence internally around cyber security.

This week I thought that I would offer my insight into some of the work being carried out behind the scenes here at the Scottish Tech Army and highlight the contribution our community of volunteers continues to make.

So who am I? Well I’m Joe, a Geography graduate who has found himself working with the STA for almost a year now (wow does the time not fly?).

Last week I joined an online session hosted by Social Enterprise Scotland discussing the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on volunteering. Attendees were a mix of SES members and organisations like the Scottish Tech Army which work to support social enterprises.

The context for the event was a report from Volunteer Scotland issued in September looking ahead to the impact of this crisis on both third sector organisations and volunteers.

AND Digital and the Scottish Tech Army are delighted to report on the successful completion of the first project to be delivered within the framework of the Tech for Good Alliance. This new initiative was launched by the Scottish Tech Army to drive the development of the Tech for Good ecosystem in the UK by building a bridge to connect the resources of leading companies in the tech sector with the digital needs of organisations in the third sector.

In September the Scottish Tech Army (STA) team was invited to our first in-person event at Codeclan - ‘The Road To Sustainable Software Engineering'. The event was held at CodeClan’s Edinburgh base at the foot of the castle rock. As always, we were warmly welcomed by the CodeClan team.

Eric Zie is theFounder and CEO of GoCodeGreen, an independent climate tech company that is dedicated to measuring the carbon efficiency of software products

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 …