LocalGov Drupal Camp

In this session, we'll introduce the concept of an open-source committee management system built collaboratively by and for councils, following the same model that produced LocalGov Drupal, and developed by the people who built the award-winning Publications Importer, Subsites Extras and Finders. 

Hammersmith & Fulham conducted a Preliminary Market Engagement for committee management software earlier this year. We responded with a proposal for a collaborative, open-source alternative, and interest from the LGD community confirmed that the appetite is real. 

We'll cover what we learned from a discovery workshop with H&F's Democratic Services team, what the Quorum feature set looks like, how the collaborative funding model works, and what we need from the community to make it happen. We'll cover the honest stuff too — timescales, cost, data migration, and where AI is actually useful rather than just claimed.

No technical knowledge needed. This session is for anyone involved in running or procuring council digital services — developers, product owners, and decision-makers alike. Familiarity with the LocalGov Drupal collaborative model will help but isn't essential.

If your council is approaching a committee management renewal decision, or has ever wondered whether there's an alternative — this session is for you.

At Greenwich, we've spent the last couple of years investing heavily in online forms - aligning with GDS standards, designing new form components, and empowering Content Designers to create accessible, high-quality forms independently. But we know we're not the only ones doing this work, and we think we could go further together.

In this session, we'll share our journey with forms and set out where we'd like to take this work next. Then we want to open it up - hear what problems you're facing, what matters to you, and find out where there's appetite to collaborate. Come ready to talk!

An interactive presentation to take the audience through the research and decisions made that brought us to the MVP and where we will go next.

The story up to now
Here we will set the scene and the background of Hackney’s replatforming and redesign, taking people through Hackney's digital setup, the website's ambitions and imposed confinements. We'll talk about what we found in discovery, what we chose to prioritise, and why.

We’ll explore how our story and findings compare to other councils’ contexts and setups.

Evidence safari
Everyone will be invited to get up close and personal with findings and quotes from private beta testing our LGD site with users. Examples include:
 

• Navigation issues
• Issues with service page components
• Information architecture suggestions
• Emerging user needs

We’ll encourage people to identify the most relevant findings for their council and discuss what they could do to address issues they are facing

Since its launch 18 months ago, the Community Fund has delivered a wealth of useful features including the award winning AI publications importer, multi-seat Elections, Bus data, and Consultations. 

In this panel session you'll hear about the latest work from [add names], how they got started and the benefits it's brought their councils. 

We'll also bring you up to date with all current Community Fund proposals, and rank the ones we should do next [a mentimeter thing Aaron?].

Updates on features and product roadmaps of the use of LGD as an intranet by Cumberland Council and hopefully Essex County Council. Including LGR enablers, authentication, private content types and more 

By June the new bus data module should be marked as stable and security tested. 

We will present the problem, how the user need was discovered, the discovery and present the final product. Then discuss a phase 2 of the project, more features and how other councils can get involved.

This session introduces the refreshed LocalGov Drupal Consultations module, a community-driven project part-funded by Walsall Council

We'll show how the module makes publishing consultations straightforward, and how it serves as the foundation for a wider engagement strategy. We will present an ambitious roadmap, including a brand new integration with an open-source marketing automation tool (Mautic) allowing councils to close the feedback loop with citizens automatically.

We'll be covering:

• Walsall Case Study - Hear directly why Walsall Council co-funded this module, and how it fits with their approach to consultations
• Feature Deep-Dive: structured feedback, timeline management, and seamless integration with LGD components. We'll show what you can achieve with the module today.
• A roadmap to narrow the functionality gap with established solutions - how the co-funding model worked and how other councils can contribute to the module’s growth.
• Live demo: E-mail marketing integration with Mautic, automatically notify citizens at key consultation milestones, segment audiences based on consultation interests, drive long-term participation through personalised campaigns

Essex County Council operates several community service directories, including Children and Families and the SEND Local Offer. These directories have grown independently over time. Service information is collected in different ways, stored separately and published through siloed workflows. The same service may appear multiple times with different details, which creates confusion for residents and extra work for staff. Keeping information accurate is resource intensive and updates depend heavily on manual processes and provider emails.

This session will share how Essex County Council are working with Big Blue Door to explore the use of Open Referral UK as a shared data standard to tackle this problem. Open Referral UK (backed by MHCLG) provides a consistent way to describe services, creating the potential for a single source of truth that can be reused across multiple Drupal sites and other platforms.

We will walk through our approach, including understanding user needs, mapping existing data to the Open Referral model and designing a collect, store, check and share workflow. We will cover how we are thinking about governance, validation, and editorial processes across teams, as well as how Drupal fits into the technical architecture for data collection, management, and publishing. 

Attendees will learn practical lessons about standards-based service directories, the benefits for residents, practitioners and service providers and the challenges we are still working through. No prior experience with Open Referral is required, but familiarity with Drupal and local government service directories will be helpful.

Attendees will discover Luton's prioritised key sections and features that mark a vital milestone as part of the council’s Residence Transformation programme. 

Learn how the team approached a content audit, applied a prioritisation matrix, and harnessed analytics to shape information architecture, highlight building user-centred design across services, securing service team buy-in, and setting up effective governance for sustainable content management. // knowledge you assume attendees will already have: content design, LGD, project management, stakeholder engagement

This session explores how we moved from using LocalGovDrupal (LGD) as a traditional content management system to treating it as a product-focused on user needs, outcomes, and continuous improvement.

Using real examples from Essex County Council, I’ll show how a product - led approach helped us design better user journeys and deliver measurable value. This includes introducing embedded contact forms to improve accessibility, reduce friction, and increase completion rates, as well as building campaign-focused landing pages to support fostering recruitment and other service priorities.

We’ll also look at how we evolved content design and architecture - such as improving the News feature for more structured, targeted communication and introducing submenus within subsites to support clearer navigation.

Beyond features, the session will cover how we prioritised work based on value, user needs, and organisational goals, including handling high-demand areas like Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) and devolution FAQs. I’ll also touch on practical aspects like reporting, analytics, and map components to support service discovery.

This is not a feature demo, but a practical look at how applying product thinking to LGD can help councils move from publishing content to delivering effective, user-centred digital services.

Everything you wanted to know about automated testing on drupal.org but were afraid to ask! The drupal.org testing infrastructure has matured over the years and offers industry standard automated testing which is easier than ever to use!

Learn how to quickly make the most of it for the projects you work with on drupal.org

Learn how to easily make use of automated testing on Drupal.org to improve code quality, reduce the chances of bugs and encourage confidence in our projects.

This session will start with how to set up testing simply, using community-recommended templates, look at debugging tests, some common problems and expand to some more quirky edge cases.

Attendees to this session should leave with a better understanding of:

• how to set up automated testing on a drupal.org project
• how to run tests locally with DDEV
• how to write simple PHPUnit tests
• how to debug tests locally with Xdebug and DDEV
• some of the idiosyncrasies of drupal.org testing
• running tests faster in parallel with test groups
• using AI to help write phpunit tests faster
• using AI to troubleshoot failing tests
• useful links to follow up after the conference
   

This session will explore different kinds of LLM, what they are used for - both in Drupal and in other applications as well - and look at the supplier landscape and tools available. The principle is to show people how to use AI without relying on the "big three" cloud providers, enabling stronger security and sovereignty without compromising performance.

AI-powered search is being added to LGD sites across the country. But most councils deploying it lack a governance framework beneath it. Who approved the model? What data is it accessing? Who is accountable when it returns an inaccurate result to a resident?

This session takes a practical, non-technical look at what it means to govern AI search within an LGD environment. We will cover what questions to ask before deployment, what a lightweight governance process looks like for a council web team, and how to document decisions in a way that satisfies your DPO.

Drawn from real experience working with councils on LGD implementations. No theory. No selling. Attendees leave with a practical governance checklist they can use the following week.

LocalGov Drupal currently provides over 30 paragraph types to support flexible content creation on service pages. While this flexibility is powerful, it can also introduce complexity, duplication and inconsistency for content designers and editors.

This interactive workshop will explore how we can simplify and improve the paragraphs system to better meet the needs of councils and content teams. Drawing on real project experience, we’ll look at how paragraphs are currently used in practice, where overlap exists, and how a smaller, more focused set of components could deliver better outcomes.

Together, we’ll examine key areas including naming conventions, identifying and reducing similar or redundant paragraph types, and improving the editor experience when adding and managing content. We’ll also discuss what a sensible “default” set of paragraphs might look like for most implementations, based on common usage patterns.

The session is designed to be collaborative and discussion led. Attendees will be encouraged to share their experiences, challenges and ideas. This session is aimed primarily at content designers and product owners. 

We'll co-create a prioritised list of the most important features councils need for Local Government Reorganisation (LGR), and aim to describe them in enough detail to estimate and raise funding for them. 

The list will include features built by councils who've already gone through LGR (like Cumberland and North Yorks), and ideas from participants. Please put your thinking caps on and tell us what would help you most.

Everyone is welcome, whether you've been through LGR already, are about to, or are not affected at all.

A 'Birds of a Feather' session on Drupal Canvas. I'll have an installation of Drupal Canvas from Drupal CMS and a chance to explore some of its capabilities. This will be a chance to discuss how I might want to use this in LGD. This will be a more informal session and whilst some technical details, will try to keep the discussion at a site builders/content design level.