Participation charter relaunch

Scotland’s Digital Participation Charter is to be relaunched in the coming weeks.

The charter, a commitment by the Scottish Government, the technology industry, academia and the third sector to increase digital participation among people and business, was launched in 2011.

Initially it was industry led, but responsibility to “scale up and accelerate activity” was passed to the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) with a small leadership group drawn from the public, private and third sectors.

SCVO appointed a director of digital participation, Chris Yiu, former head of the Policy Exchange’s digital government unit. With around 60 companies, organisations and institutions already committed, SCVO is encouraging more to sign up ahead of the relaunch.

“For the participation charter relaunch, we have refreshed the commitments to focus on signatories,” said Chris Yiu, “helping their staff and volunteers to learn basic digital skills, and to do what they can to help us get more people in Scotland online. We’ve had lots of interest already and are looking forward to working with signatories on a range of practical projects in the months ahead.”

The relaunch is among a series of initiatives this autumn. They include:

• Let’s Get Digital, a new business growth project to boost the digital capability of charities and voluntary organisations in Scotland;
• The first tranche of awards from a new digital participation Challenge Fund to support community projects;
• A new searchable directory to help people in Scotland to find local face-to-face support to learn basic online skills;
• A new set of consistent, accredited resources for people in Scotland learning basic online skills;
• First steps toward making it easier for developers to link to and work with data about the third sector in Scotland;
• A major digital participation event, #DigiScotFest North in Inverness this October.