LocalGov Drupal (Beta)

The Drupal project is awarded £150,000 for their Beta phase.

The project receives a further £275,000 of funding through the Continuous Funding Model to continue their Beta phase.

The project began their beta phase of work.

11 councils signed the MoU to adopt the shared codebase for local government websites, with representatives attending fortnightly product group meet-ups and sharing features they have developed with others.

The team ran regular skills sessions for council web publishers. Recent sessions (available to watch on YouTube) have covered using GitHub, accessibility, and GDPR and cookies.

The project also featured in an international report on government software cooperatives and a dedicated case study by the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory.

Project lead, Will Callaghan, wrote an article about the project’s approach to collaborative code development for Open Access Government.

The team also uploaded two more video skills sessions to their website and YouTube. 

Mark Conroy published a blog post in which he talks about how users can create ‘sensible defaults’ in their theming templates.

The project became a finalist in the ‘Sharing Economy’ category at the Impact Awards! 

The team started the workstream focused on communications, future governance and supporting new partners to adopt the codebase.

Will Huggins, CEO of Drupal development agency Zoocha, wrote an article for Open Access Government on the opportunity of open source technology in local government, which references the project.

The team gave a presentation about the project during the Digital Leaders Week Lightning Talk session (skip to 4:00 minutes).

The project team tested sociocracy as a method for managing the growing community, and so far the decentralised working groups have been working well.

The team also met with GDS to talk about their planned work on Forms and the possibility of using GaaP products and PaaS (Platform as a Service) as a viable alternative to the solutions more commonly used in local government.

The project team, in collaboration with colleagues working on the Open Referral UK data standard, launched a directories module that is fully compliant with the standard. 

This important piece of cross-project working means that the 11 councils that have already adopted the codebase can now also be considered as potential adopters of Open Referral UK. The module also uses Open Active, a standard for describing the linking to sports and leisure facilities. Read more in this blog post by Ekes.

The team held a mid-point user research feedback session. During the session they shared lots of fascinating insights into the findings to date, covering areas such as joining the collective, the product, promotion and future plans.

The team started work on their ‘shop window’ website.

The team launched a fortnightly newsletter to make it easy to follow the project.

The team held a workshop on designing co-operatives with Mark Simmonds from Co-op Culture, to run through options for the type of legal entity they could launch in the future.

Members of the Drupal project team spoke at four different events as part of DrupalCon Europe in early October, the largest international Drupal conference on the continent.

The project beta entered its final sprint. The team began focusing on the structure of their business model and what options there are to manage the codebase and contributors going forwards. 

Their product website was updated and improved — you can now easily find out more about the project, access developer resources such as Github, and have a look at their demo site.

The team took part in LocalGovCamp21 ‘Lite’! by giving a Lightning Talk about the project.

The LocalGov Drupal team concluded their beta phase and started working on their beta report.

The team can now count 19 councils and 7 suppliers among their community.

The Drupal project receives £400,000 to continue with their Beta project. The funds will be used to:

• develop a microsites module for the codebase
• transition to a legal entity with a sustainable business model

The project featured in a dedicated blog post on drupal.org, written by Annertech, one of the eight suppliers working within the LocalGov Drupal community.

To date, 24 councils have adopted — or are in the process of adopting — the codebase. The latest Steering Group Meeting focused on the detail behind the business model and the different options for fee structures.

The Agile Collective, supported by Annertech, has been successfully appointed as the delivery partner for the project’s next phase of work, which will deliver a new microsites module to the LocalGov Drupal platform.

Listen to the recent Talking Drupal video cast to hear members of the team discussing the project — including what it is and who it’s for.

The project team has also just introduced a new fortnightly drop-in session for content designers from LocalGov Drupal member councils, where they can network, share ideas and contribute to the core distribution.