Significant changes have occurred at LocalGov Drupal in the last year within our organisation and digital products.
Our previous two mission patches, from “Transform” to “Flying Solo,” sum it up nicely.
We moved from a project funded by the central government to an independent organisation, Open Digital Cooperative.
Our co-operative now has a newly elected board of directors, and 42 members and subscribers from local councils and their suppliers. They contribute financially (and in other ways) to improve and develop our digital products. Together, we’ve achieved so much in the last year.
Thank you to all those who’ve chipped in and contributed.
How we spent your money
The chart below shows our spending in the first year.
As you can see, most of our income (68%) was spent on Product Development and Tech.
We think that’s how it should be, and we’re sure you’ll agree. As income rises with your support, we intend to increase the proportion of income spent on product development and tech.
We want to continue to invest in our products for the benefit of all councils and their users.
We can only do this if councils and suppliers renew their subscriptions.
The benefits of renewal are obvious: the more councils contribute, the more we can build together and improve the distribution.
The subscription also covers tech support (mostly through our Slack channel) and our work facilitating collaboration. We know asking our community and LocalGov Drupal’s on-call developers is extremely valuable. If you’ve done this, we’d love to hear your feedback.
All these aspects are vital in creating a thriving community and best-in-class CMS.
The financial contributions we receive help ensure our products are as good as they can be for all our users, whether they be service users or content designers.
The collaboration works well and allows us to bring some fantastic work into core, despite limited funding.
Continued Development and Improvements
Thanks to your contributions, the list of things our community has achieved over the last 12 months is pretty phenomenal (even if we say so ourselves).
Here’s a rundown of some of the things we’ve accomplished together:
- Drupal 10 upgrade - Thanks, Finn, Andy, Steph, and others
- Microsites - Alpha to Beta - Thanks, Finn and the team
- Multilingual as standard - Thanks, Mark (Annertech)
- Demo decision tree webform - Thanks, Mark (Annertech) and Essex County Council
- Display options for unpublished web forms - Thanks, Mark (Annertech) and Essex County Council
- Print style sheets - Thanks, Mark (Annertech)
- Active directory integration - Thanks, Matt (Nomensa)
- Countless pull requests and quality-of-life improvements for devs and content designers - Thanks, Andy from Brighton Council and Adnan from Croydon
- Updated docs and how-to videos - Thanks, Marios (Orion) and Mark (Annertech)
- New Product newsletter and Product Group - Thanks to Will and the core team
All the fixes, updates, and improvements are now available to ALL councils. This is a huge time and money save for those who use our platform.
There is also some very exciting work close to fruition, including:
- Publications - Thanks, Ryan at Hammersmith and Fulham Council and Chicken
- Increased subsite flexibility and navigation - Thanks, Ryan at Hammersmith and Fulham Council and Chicken
- Elections - Thanks, Cumberland and Westmorland Council and Rohallion
- Intranet modules - Thanks to Essex Council
- Netcall integrations - Thanks, Kevin and Adnan from Croydon Council, Craig from Westmorland Council and Paul from Netcall
We look forward to bringing these into the core over the coming months.
Growing community
We’ve also seen many more LocalGov Drupal sites, and Microsites launched in the past 12 months, and we’re fast becoming the UK's number one web publishing platform for councils.
Forty-three councils are now part of our collaboration; most have launched their LGD site. We know many more will be switching to our CMS. This is great news; the more councils that contribute, the stronger the product(s).
Other organisations are also using the platform, such as Home Connections, a not-for-profit letting agent owned and led by local authorities and housing associations, who have launched 25 sites using our platform.
We also hosted the first annual LocalGov Drupal Week, which was a huge success. We ran 14 sessions over five days, with over 530 attendees joining us. Its success was thanks to the excellent contributions from our thriving community. Thanks to all those who recently took part.
This all demonstrates the huge potential for LocalGov Drupal to continue its rapid growth. We hope subscribers will renew subscriptions and continue with us on this fantastic journey of collaboration and public sector digital transformation.