Consultation on the 'common database' project
In 2006 the Brighton and Hove Changeup Consortium started work on a 'common database', a government-funded project aimed at bringing information about local community groups and voluntary groups together into one online database that groups could update themselves.
In March 2010 Community Base was asked to respond to a report on the project, which by then had cost around £50,000. Our director contributed the response below, which we were told would be considered at the first meeting of a new consortium committee, the 'monitoring subgroup'.
Community Base contribution to consultation on the 'common database' project
I have read the report on the 'Common Database' project and discussed it with one of the report's authors - and I cannot see why so much time, effort and money is still being put into it. Here are some of my concerns.
It isn't necessary. There is no demand from local charities and community groups for such an overly-complex, difficult-to-work-with and expensive-to-run database. Brighton and Hove Community and Voluntary Sector Forum (CVSF) already has a directory of local community and voluntary groups that local groups find useful, Community Base lists local services and venues (some community and voluntary sector, some not), ESCIS lists many groups' details, other groups have established databases on children's services and other specialist areas run by people with expertise in their fields. These databases (along with Google and a host of other ways of finding stuff out, many of them not electronic!) overlap, refer to each other, compliment each other and meet different needs - that’s how data works in the 21st century. If CVSF, the Working Together Project (WTP), SCIP and any other organisations want to join up their mailing lists / databases that is entirely up to them but I don't see why we need to set up a 'project team' - with all the expense, people time and bureaucracy that will inevitably entail – and pretend this is The One Big Database when that's all that is really happening.
It won't work. The report is damning about how difficult this project is to work with - why go on? Community Base runs three local databases - for volunteering opportunities, community services and venues for hire - and even with fully functioning, user-friendly software it requires significant staff time to keep them accurate and up to date. I cannot see how a project based on hundreds of groups updating information regularly using software that is difficult to use will work without ongoing staff costs that would be entirely disproportionate to the benefits of the project.
It isn't a 'common' database'. It would be disingenous to claim that the ‘Common Database’ is a ‘common’ one ‘owned’ by anyone other than the group or groups who do own it. Community Base’s experience of databases run by CVSF/WTP/ChangeUp Consortium is that they often exclude us - we are not mentioned in CVSF’s ‘your guide to support services for community and voluntary sector groups in brighton and hove' pamphlet or on the ‘Support for Groups’ website’s list of ‘Local support organisations’ - I could give other examples. Obviously CVSF and the ChangeUp Consortium are entitled to omit groups they don’t want to list from their databases but I would never advise any independent group to rely on another organisation's database when its data could, as in these examples, be based on that organisation's likes and dislikes rather than reality and the needs of the people the data is meant to benefit.
It costs too much. Community Base is not a member of Brighton and Hove ChangeUp Consortium, so in a sense this project is not our concern. However I would be extremely concerned if local authority money that would otherwise go to help local frontline services was being diverted to continuing this project. I understand the 'Common Database' has already cost more than £50,000 with little or no benefit to frontline services - can someone tell me where the proposed £20,000 to keep this project going for another two years is coming from and assure me it is not being diverted from local frontline services?
I hope that's a useful contribution to the discussion.
Colin Chalmers
Community Base director
31st March 2010