Democratising Access to Community Services using ALISS (DACS)
Scotland has a national digital programme, ALISS – A Local Information System for Scotland, which helps people to find the services, resources, activities and groups that they need to live well and stay connected to their community.
About the project
The DACS project seeks to enhance the data quality and widen access for seldom heard communities through social prescribing and the creation of a voice interface.
ALISS is designed to enable people and professionals to find and share information on organisations, services, groups, resources and support in their local communities and online.
The DACS project is a unique collaboration between four partner organisations:
- The Health and Social Care Alliance (the ALLIANCE)– leading on the service design and co-creation of ALISS with people with lived experience and support professionals.
- Tactuum– the overall DACS project lead and responsible for the redevelopment of the ALISS database, website and API.
- Access Group– leading on integrating ALISS data into the Elemental social prescribing platform.
- TL Tech– leading the development of a new voice application for ALISS using the Amazon Alexa smart speakers.
The aims of the project are to provide:
- More data – to increase the amount of information that people can access from ALISS. Exploring the possibility of intelligently aggregating from other directories and information sources, to provide a national ‘single source of truth’.
- Better data – improving the quality of data hosted on ALISS; making its maintenance, and the experience of data providers better. As the data held within ALISS is provided by citizens and organisations, the system requires better guidance and support to ensure data is consistent and regularly reviewed and updated.
- Better experience – by improving the experiences of people accessing information through the ALISS website directly or indirectly via the ALISS API (application programming interface). This includes aspects such as the accessibility of the website, search accuracy and allowing the user to customise their search through filters and sorting of results.
- More users – by increasing the number of people who access ALISS or information hosted by ALISS. This will be achieved through two different technology integrations. The first is with the Access Elemental software social prescribing platform which will enable practitioners (such as social prescribers and community links workers) to access ALISS data and identify suitable support avenues. The second development opportunity which will be co-designed with TL Tech and a broad range of stakeholders is the creation of an accessible voice application on the Amazon Alexa smart speakers.