Comhairle nan Eilean Siar goes live with Tellmescotland!

Tellmescotland is now into its sixth year of operation and January'16 has seen the total number of Councils using the PINs Portal rise to 30 with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar being the latest to adopt and implement the portal. The Council has initially gone live with publishing Licensing Notices to the tellmescotland with plans afoot to upload Planning Notices also. This is a great achievement for all those involved in the project!

There are also 21 Other Organisations which have adopted the portal, and you can find out more about these Organisations here.

Renfrewshire Council has now started to upload Licensing Notices to the tellmescotland portal adding to the number of councils uploading all four types of notice.

Midlothian Council has committed to adopting tellmescotland for its licensing notices with expected Go Live in Early 2016.

Engagement meetings have been taking place with the Highland Council to explore the possibility of extending its use of tellmescotland to Licensing and Roads Notices.

Remember you can sign up to receive alerts to find out what is going on your area.

Scottish Community Councils website is relaunched

The relaunch of Scottish Community Councils website (www.communitycouncils.scot) is the result of a wish to create an improved website for community councillors and for people interested in community council work to find up-to-date information and advice. The new website has a more inviting visual appearance and provides a clearer structure, which makes the site easier to navigate and the information more accessible to users.

The new site also introduces new features, such as:

• An improved community council location finder based on open data from the local authorities. The location finder will provide easy access to finding any Scottish community council, with all community council boundaries being available for the first time in a single online and searchable map. As an extra feature the map will also make it possible to see live Public Information Notices through data from tellmescotland.gov.uk. The application has been created especially by the Improvement Service’s Spatial Information Programme.
• A dialogue area, where guest editors will be given a voice on community council issues. This area will be linked with the Knowledge Hub Community Council group and further discussion will be encouraged in the forum of this group
• An event calendar to highlight any events relevant to community councils.
• New channels to create networks for community councillors, including highlighting the CC twitter accounts, links and info about the Community Council Knowledge Hub group, a regular newsletter.
• A new well-defined link section for the site to provide a portal to other relevant organisations.

The new website is going to be a live and changing website and a central place for information for community councils. The site already has a variety of useful resources to help with anything from planning to community engagement, and onwards there will be an emphasis on creating even richer content with more showcases of the fantastic work being done by community councils across Scotland. In collaboration with community councillors and other organisations, we will create more online guidance and help for current community councillors with a focus on becoming a genuine portal for all community councillors in Scotland.