Digital

  • Online engagement event: Reflections of being Webinar host

    18th October 2022 by

    Guest blog by Carol Sinclair, Strategic Data Adviser for the Scottish Government and Independent Chair of the Health and Social Care Data Board. Determining the best point in time to bring in wider views on any draft document is a bit of a lottery with it highly unlikely you will satisfy the spectrum of views...

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  • Online engagement event: discussing principles for enabling data’s value

    14th October 2022 by

    We hosted the ‘Unlocking Value of Public Sector Personal Data: Guiding Principles Design’ webinar on 1 September, to get feedback from the public and data practitioners on draft high-level principles for the programme. This would be the first of several opportunities for practitioners, and the wider public, to participate in a citizen-led, collaborative process.

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  • Unlocking the Value of Public Sector Data for Public Benefit: Blog #4

    14th October 2022 by

    The IEG met for the fifth time at the end of August, and the focus was on engagement. By this we meant engaging, not just with experts on data, industry representatives and policy makers, but also with the wider community and public. Consequently, engagement experts Democratic Society have been appointed by the Scottish Government to support the group with this important facet of our work.

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  • Enhancing the professional development of teachers in Computing Science

    14th October 2022 by

    A partnership between Aberdeen City Council, NEScol, Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen, it aims to disseminate the recommendations from the Scottish Government-commissioned Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review and promote opportunities for professional development in teaching Computing Science (CS).

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  • Data Science Accelerator launches for 2022

    7th October 2022 by

    After months of planning, we were delighted to finally be able to bring the Data Science Accelerator cohort of participants and mentors for 2022 together with The Data Lab at our recent launch event in Edinburgh. This year marks the fifth edition of this innovative capability building programme and we are delighted to welcome 16 applicants and volunteer mentors onto the accelerator.

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  • Draft principles for unlocking the value of Scotland’s public sector personal data for public benefit

    19th August 2022 by

    Members of the Independent Expert Group on Unlocking the Value of Public Data for Public Benefit, have been working over the summer on a draft set of principles to guide decision-making by data controllers in the Scottish public sector. I want to thank my fellow IEG members for their contributions to these draft principles.

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  • Data and Intelligence Network comes of age

    1st August 2022 by

    May 2020 was where it began as the need to collaborate across organisations was recognised to support decision making and management around the COVID-19 pandemic. Gartner was commissioned to lead a taskforce to create a Scottish cross-agency network which would foster collaboration across the public sector’s data community. Thus the Scottish Government COVID-19 Data & Intelligence Network was born.

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  • How the Data Science Accelerator sparked a solution to meet a Covid data challenge

    21st July 2022 by

    Blog by Joyce Dalgleish, Business Change Manager, Scottish Public Sector Analytical Collaborative. The Data Science Accelerator is a 12 week development programme that gives public sector analysts the opportunity to build their data science skills through project-based mentoring. Delivered by the Scottish Public Sector Analytical Collaborative (SPACe), the accelerator is helping to develop data science capability...

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  • Next steps for Scotland’s Official Statistics Open Data platform

    14th July 2022 by

    Blog by Victoria Avila and Martin Macfie, Data Division, Digital Directorate In the Open Data team within Scottish Government, part of our role is to manage the publication of open datasets on statistics.gov.scot. This is the open data publishing platform for Official Statistics in Scotland. The platform contains around 300 datasets and reference datasets published...

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  • Unlocking the Value of Public Sector Data for Public Benefit: Blog #3

    12th July 2022 by

    In June 2022, the Independent Expert Group (IEG) came together for the fourth time, as part of our series of monthly meetings. As a collection of experts from different sectors, backgrounds and practices, the group is united in its aim to advise the Scottish Government on how personal dataset-holders in the Scottish public sector can make decisions about how these datasets might be used by the private sector. The group wishes to ensure that whenever this occurs, it has to be of public benefit to the people of Scotland, in ways that promote transparency and trust.

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