This DiscoverDC portal was borne out of a Dundee College project plan to make new and innovative services available to digitally disadvantaged individuals and communities.  The overall aim is to increase engagement with excluded groups and enhance standards of community engagement and capacity building.

The portal itself has been designed and developed by The McIntosh Partnership and Bannerman Technology in conjunction with key college staff engaged in community work, guidance, supported learning and the use of e-learning and resources.  The portal focuses on Dundee College's community work and on the work done by the wide range of community organisations within Dundee and the Tayside area. It has immediate benefits in promoting and therefore making available to the Dundee community all the training and events that take place across the city from one website. It will also enable individual organisations that may or may not have their own web presence to promote their activities on this site and for it eventually to be a vehicle for a shared use of resources. We think that it will encourage much closer working between community organisations within the city.

We have developed the existing Employment Driver, which was originally a CD based resource and dependent on specific computer technologies, into a training tool that can be used fully online from any browser. It has also been updated to reflect changes in practice. Further developments may involve building the training activities contained within the resource into a self contained resource which will give more ownership to clients and support workers using the tool to develop employability skills.

Our plans during this year are to take the portal to community organisations and work with them in developing their ideas on how they see the site being used for their organisation and their clients. We hope also to build in additional technical functionality depending on the views and requirements of our community partners.