ALISS review of 2022

Throughout 2022, ALISS has continued to increase the availability and accessibility of information about community assets and services

ALISS (A Local Information System for Scotland) increases the visibility of third sector organisations and community assets and in turn promotes their role in supporting health and wellbeing. As of 1 November 2022, ALISS has 5582 services listed, 4564 account holders registered, and 993 organisations claimed by a representative of that organisation. Between 2020-21 and 2021-22 the number of people searching on the ALISS Programme’s own aliss.org website was 104,440, a rise of 40,576 on 2020/21.

Partnership and engagement activity has continued to promote and raise awareness of aliss.org both for people searching for information, and for those looking to share information. Examples include:

• Partnership work with NHS Highland Community Led Support (CLS) Programme to support the use of ALISS for signposting within CLS Hubs in local areas.
• Work with Third Sector Interfaces such as VANL in North Lanarkshire and CTSI in Clackmannanshire to encourage local groups and organisations to add and claim their information on ALISS and to promote the aliss.org site locally.

ALISS also makes information available beyond the aliss.org website, through the variety of other channels where different people, including professionals and the public may go to look for it. With an aim to further increase access to ALISS data, work throughout 2022 has therefore also sought to expand the number of places where this data is available, examples of which include:

• Relevant ALISS data is now displayed through the Find Local Food Services section of the Glasgow Community Food Network’s website to help people find community food resources.
• Mydex CIC have integrated ALISS data into their Inclued system which is used currently by Glasgow City Council, Scottish Government, Macmillan Cancer Support and Blackwood.
• ALISS data is also now available through East Ayrshire HSCP’s Living Well website, as part of ongoing partnership work with NHS24 in relation to Scotland’s Service Directory (SSD).

Technical development of ALISS continues based on Agile methodology and User Centric Service Design principles. User Research this year focused on accessibility of the aliss.org website for people living with sensory loss and dementia and in addition to publishing a report, a number of recommendations have been outlined for inclusion in upcoming ‘Sprints’.

Building on the migration of the ALISS system to the Microsoft Azure platform which went live in July 2022, further technical development is underway through the Democratising Access to Community Support (DACS) Project which has been funded by Innovate UK and is formed of a partnership between the ALLIANCE, Tactuum Ltd, TL Tech Ltd, and Access Group.

As part of this project, a User Researcher and Service Designer have joined the ALISS team to ensure that the design process involves ALISS users and that developments are carried out in a way that meets their needs. The vision for this project is to take ALISS to the next level, providing a number of developments to the system including exploration of intelligent data aggregation, more personalised search experience, integration of ALISS data within the Elemental social prescribing platform, and making ALISS available through voice activation on Amazon’s Alexa platform.

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