dgInfo's principal objective is to provide a single source of information on the activities, facilities, issues, resources and services dealt with or provided by the community and voluntary sector in Dumfries and Galloway. The primary audience for this information was intended to be the public.

The requirements of professional users were also to be catered for and considerable research went into identifying the data needed by professional users.

Much of this work was carried out in close collaboration with the Scottish Voluntary Sector Data Management Consortium (SVSDMC). The Consortium was established by the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations to coordinate the activities of the voluntary sector across Scotland in moving towards a situation in which data could be shared for statistical and decision-making purposes.

The initial data structures in which newly collected or verified data was to be stored were designed in close collaboration with Dumfries and Galloway Council, based on the SVSDMC guidelines conditioned by the requirements of the Dumfries and Galloway Community Portal.

Data Classification

Several classification systems were considered and it was decided to use a system currently employed by a large community database project in Vancouver, Canada. Rather than every record being placed into one category, every record has assigned to it a list of ‘whats’, that is activities, facilities, issues, resources and services that the organisation/section deals with or is associated with.

Unlike standard keyword searches this system is ‘closed’. That is the user can only search on ‘whats’ that are actually in the system. This prevents ‘nonsense’ results.

Data Collection

In the summer of 2003 four data collectors were employed for an initial 3 month period. That there were four data collectors was based on the idea that the CVS areas were meaningful divisions for the purposes of data collection. Each data collector was to cover a CVS area. The first phase of the project involved the identification of existing sources of data and the collection of these together into one working list.

The Working List was compiled from:
Dumfries and Galloway Council’s Clubs and Organisations Database.
Membership lists supplied by the CVSs.
CVS area-based lists of community and voluntary organisations (supplied by the CVSs).
Names of organisations collected from telephone directories.
Names of organisations collected from public notice/poster boards (such as Health Centres, Libraries etc)

When these lists were merged into one it was quickly apparent that by no means all the records in the list represented separate organisations. No systematic distinction was made between an organisation and ‘sections’ (branches, departments, offices) of that organisation.

Organisations with sections in more than one CVS area appeared more than once. Where there were many sections in a CVS area the organisation appeared many times. For example Dumfries and Galloway Mental Health Association, which is a single organisation, appeared five times in the Working List because it has five sections.

The Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, on the other hand, has many ‘branches’ across the region but each ‘branch’ has its own charity number and is therefore formally a separate organisation.

As a result of this the original data model had to be modified. The data collectors were given thematic, rather than geographical divisions of the organisations to be interviewed, which made the data collection considerably more efficient. After the appropriate changes, verified and newly collected data was entered into the database.

The project soon proved to be significantly more resource-intensive than anticipated and the data collectors' employment was extended for a further 3 months.

Where are we now?

Organisation contact and address details as well as type, status, aims, objectives were recorded.
Information has also been captured about organisations’ regulators and funders and about their financial reporting.
Where appropriate information about organisations’ official documentation (eg constitution) has been recorded.

393 organisations were interviewed.
These organisations have 847 sections.
These organisations have a presence in 1017 locations across the region.
These organisations have between them 1971 posts (paid and voluntary).
The sections are classified on around over 1000 searchable ‘whats’.

The address information is based on the new national Database of National Addresses. This system standardises address formats and provides a single official address for every location in the UK. Unfortunately the section for Dumfries and Galloway is not yet complete causing there to be gaps in our data at the present time.

The latest version of this ‘information store’ is now online.