3 February 2022

Directories Show and Tell

Will Callaghan, project lead here at LocalGov Drupal, reflects on a recent Directories Show and Tell that we ran alongside Greenwich Council.

The two hour session was attended by over 60 individuals from councils right across the UK, all of whom are looking to improve their directories offering.

It was fantastic to see so many people turn out for the session on directories recently. A big thanks to all those who presented and participated.

You can find a video of the session on our Youtube channel >

Directories show and tell. Screen grab from Youtube

At the event we heard insights from five councils and LocalGov Drupal:

Buckinghamshire, on developing their Family Information Service and the Open Referral standard. See the presentation >
Huntingdon’s work on co-designing service directories with a community organisation.

Document

SENA - Co-designed Needs Based Service Directory.pdf (PDF, 791.76KB)
Greenwich, talking about its vision for a community directory and discovery plan See the presentation >
Dorset update on its directory thinking. See the presentation >
Essex CC updating on its Local Offer work.

Document

Essex SEND Local Offer.pdf (PDF, 15.5MB)

We didn’t present a deck, rather links to design mockups, live sites and the admin view that a content designer sees. You can see most of these links below.

Energy and ideas

The fact that it was so well attended suggests a couple of things:

There is a very real desire among councils to collaborate on projects and LocalGov Drupal is ready to help make this happen.
Councils are probably not that satisfied with their directories (or at least their users aren’t) so there is a demand for some more thinking and work in this area. We know that this is underway in various guises not least with us - directories work is part of our collective Product Roadmap with more work due to start on them later this year.

But was it useful?

It was great that so many speakers came forward and wanted to share their insights and work. I certainly found the session useful for a few reasons.

At a basic level, there are features all of our products need - for example, the ability for users to search by location. We ought to research these features together, and share the findings so that they can be provided by a variety of platforms, including ours.

We need to think bigger though - as Greenwich is doing - about the information that users need, when they need it, how they find it, keeping it up to date and accurate, plus more besides. The work that Open Referral is doing on data standards is vital here, and all councils should support it.

It reminds me of my introduction to Open Referral. In this video, the founder of Open Referral, Greg Bloom, talks about his grandmother “being the Google of her day”. A source of accurate authoritative knowledge that a community can count on. This is a job we need to take on, together.

We’d love to hear from you

There was a clear desire to have another session on directories later in the year to follow up on everything that was discussed.

We’re very happy to help facilitate this again.

As mentioned above we’re due to form a Directories Working Group later this year to further develop our own directories offering.

We’ll try to use a second session as a springboard for this.

Please let us know if you’re interested in presenting at a second directories session.

A note on diversity

The audience was quite diverse, but the speaker line wasn’t. When we run another session we’ll make every effort to fix this.

If you have any more comments, please let us know.

Background to the session

The Local Digital Fund has provided resources to do some great work around directories over recent years.

This includes:

Open Referral Standards
LocalGov Drupal in our BETA phase
The recent award to Greenwich for community directory work.

Some great work has already been done building off the back of this funding. This includes three brilliant examples of where LocalGov Drupal has been used to improve directories:

There is also more work being undertaken to further improve our directories code base: