Lochgoil.
The story so far.

The next milestone is bringing Community Ready to residents across Lochgoil.

A community-wide launch event is planned for 17 October, led by Alastair, the elected member responsible for resilience, alongside local organisations involved in the Resilience Plan.

Community Ready will attend to showcase the app and public community website, answer questions and help residents download the app and get started.

The event will use Community Ready’s promotional and demonstration material to introduce the service and show how it can support everyday communication and emergency preparedness.

Administrator training is planned for the week beginning 5 October.

With the Community Admin and Local Bodies being set up, the next step is to help their administrators become familiar with the portal and the information they will manage.

Pages, events and Local Group sections will start taking shape as the teams prepare for launch. The training will include administrators working with Local Groups and the community’s Resilience Plan.

The aim is to have local teams ready to publish and maintain useful information when residents begin using the service.

Community Admin onboarding is scheduled for 1 October.

This is the step from demonstrating the platform to preparing it for local use. The Community Admin will be introduced to the portal, with Local Bodies and their administrators set up ahead of training.

It will give the community team the access and starting structure it needs to begin preparing pages, events and information for residents.

A demonstration to the Community Council and attending residents helped shape what Community Ready would become.

The council supported the app and community website. Lucy, the elected member responsible for communications, was keen for it to become the council’s main communication channel.

Residents’ questions and suggestions led to two developments.

Helping event organisers stay in touch

The Event Owner role lets organisers email people who have registered an interest in their assigned events and opted to receive updates.

More space for Local Groups

The original single page for each local organisation grew into a section with its own menus, multiple pages and forms, managed through the Community Portal.

Administrators can add rich text, photographs, documents and embedded YouTube videos, with published content available through the app and public website.

Interest continued after the meeting, with residents approaching those who attended to find out more.

The first pitch to Lochgoil’s resilience group received a positive response.

By September, the idea had become a working app that could be shown to the people involved in the community’s resilience work.

It brought the project back to the local conversations that had inspired it: making information easier to find, keeping the emergency plan accessible and giving residents a useful place to return to.

By August, the first working version of Community Ready was ready to demonstrate.

The idea had developed from a map and an emergency plan into a broader community app, with news and events alongside practical resilience information.

A working version made it possible to show the idea to local groups and hear how it could support the community.

The app needed to be somewhere residents would already know and use.

As Adam researched the idea, he discovered Ready Scotland and considered the value of keeping resilience information alongside everyday community information.

Residents would be more familiar with the app if they had a reason to use it regularly, rather than first looking for it during an emergency.

That thinking led to news and events being added to the original map and emergency-plan idea.

Could a local map and the emergency plan live together in an app, available during a power cut?

That was the idea that became Community Ready. It brought together the need to find places in Lochgoil and the work being done on the community’s Resilience Plan.

The starting point was a practical tool that residents could keep on their phones, with important local information still accessible when power or connectivity was disrupted.

Adam discovered that community resilience involved much more than maintaining power.

Key stakeholders were writing a detailed Resilience Plan. Its scope brought two concerns into focus.

The first was finding places in Lochgoil. Many homes have names rather than numbers, which can make it difficult to work out where something is.

The second was the scale of the plan itself. This was a long-term piece of community work, raising the question of how the information could remain accessible and useful to residents.

Community Ready began with a local conversation about resilience.

In April, Adam, the founder of Community Ready, attended a resilience group meeting in Lochgoil. He was there partly in connection with an ambitious project to secure a generator that could power the village hall during power cuts.

The generator project brought him into the community’s wider resilience discussions. Those conversations would go on to inspire a different kind of practical support: an app for local information and emergency preparedness.