List of Tech Companies is Scotland, and the tool to run it

Hello,

In Scotland now I’ve been doing Open Data events for years at https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ and recently several people have been talking to me about listing companies.

So here is the start of our list, launched this week: https://find.techin.scot/companies/

Anyone can add a company thro a simple form: https://find.techin.scot/companies/add/ Moderated of course.

You can also suggest changes to companies or report them - see links beside any company.

All this is run through a new tool I’m working on, a PHP/Symfony/Postgresql app which is open source at GitHub - Directoki/Directoki-Core - tho I haven’t made any attempt to document it yet!

This could be used to run a directory of data and take user submissions automatically - you can customise the fields you want.

On user submissions, it also asks for the submitters email address and the plan is in the future it will regularly prompt submitters to make sure the data is still correct.

All this is based on the belief that to run a data source in a sustained way and keep the data up to date in the future, you need to cultivate a group of people who can easily maintain it. I’ve occasionally graphed the contributors to Open Tech Calendar: It’s our 2nd Birthday! – Open Tech Calendar

We are also already talking to people about them pulling off and re-using a subset of the data, and to help that we have worked on code to allow tagging entries.

We might be reusing this tool for a refugee charity, which will bring new challenges - allowing an entry to be translated, and highlighting entries that need translating. (We have thoughts on how to do this but no code yet.)

Anyway, If others are interested in working on this happy to chat tho I’m pretty busy for the next few months …
James