This data set was produced by Jeremy Kidwell as a part of a research project that was jointly funded by the AHRC/ESRC (Grant Ref: AH/K005456/1) and based at the University of Edinburgh. The data is available for academic use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. For full details, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.

The set was produced using publicly available data from the Eco-Congregation Scotland website (http://www.ecocongregationscotland.org/about-us/list-of-eco-congregation-churches) between Aug 2014 and Feb 2016. Site locations were resolved to coordinates in a variety of ways, in some cases measured onsite using GPS equipment, in others using the Google Maps API. Data was checked against the ONS Postcode Directory (2014 v2) and was generated using QGIS 2.8.2.

Data in this set includes six fields:
- 1-2 provide X and Y coordinates. These are set to the British National Grid (OSGB 1936 / EPSG 27700)
- 3 specifies the name of the Eco-Congregation 
- 4 specified the Eco-Congregation Scotland network in which the site resides (as of 2016)
- 5 provides the denomination (if any) - see below for a note on using this data. Abbreviations represent the following: “C of S” = Church of Scotland; “SEC” = Scottish Episcopal Church; “URC” = United Reformed Church; “RC” = Roman Catholic; “Meth” = Methodist; “Non.” = Not a religious community; “Independent” = Not affiliated with any formal denomination; “FCS” = Free Church of Scotland; “Ecu” = Ecumenical, represents several denominations; “Cong” = Congregational Church
- 6 indicates the year in which each Eco-Congregation officially registered under the programme, this data has been confirmed, as possible with Eco-Congregation Scotland staff. 

There are two important caveats to note about this data. For researchers hoping to conduct sociological analysis based on denominational designation I note that Scottish denominational designations can be misleading, particularly in more remote locations where there may only be a single place of worship. Research conducted by Fiona Tweedie (Church of Scotland) indicated that in some cases when persons in a Church of Scotland parish were asked about their denominational identity, it could range quite widely. I highlight this fact just to indicate that the aggregate denominational make-up of this data set does not necessarily indicate that those persons working in groups at Eco-Congregations are necessarily affiliated with the Church of Scotland, etc. For more on this, you can read the “Ecumenical Audit” report here: http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/18025/Ecumenical-Audit-Report.pdf.

Second, it is important to note that churches in Scotland are in the process of some reorganisation. Some churches have closed and their parish are served through another site, others have merged, even across denominations, and still others remain open but share a minister with other sites. We developed a protocol to sift through these various transitions in order to provide as accurate a geospatial representation of the current state of these community groups in Scotland. If a site is officially closed and served by another location, it was not included in this set. If a site shares a minister, but remains open for meetings at least once a month, it was included as a unique data point. If a site is shared with several different communities it was counted as a single data point. 

One final note: This data set has been simplified for ease of use. This is the first release in a range of planned geospatial data sets of British community groups which will include permaculture, transition, development trusts, and places of worship. For more information on this data, please email j.kidwell@bham.ac.uk or join the mapping community mailing list (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MAPPING-COMMUNITY).

Revision History:

2.9	This is the first publicly available instance of this data set.