We're delighted that the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) has confirmed LocalGov Drupal as a Digital Public Good.
Our platform now sits on a global register of open source software that any public body, anywhere, can pick up and adapt.
Only 256 organisations and platforms worldwide currently meet the criteria. LocalGov Drupal is one of them.
Public organisations should not have to buy or build the same thing over and over again.
Digital public goods are open source tools that are free to adopt and adapt. The idea is simple: public organisations should not have to buy or build the same thing over and over again.
That has always been the point of LocalGov Drupal. Before it existed, councils typically replaced their websites every three to five years, often starting from scratch. Now they can get up and running quickly on shared code and spend their budgets on content design, user research, and new features everyone can reuse.
For anyone writing a business case or talking to procurement, the status also offers something useful: an independent check. An outside reviewer has confirmed that LocalGov Drupal is genuinely open, clearly owned and not tied to any single supplier.
What we had to show
The DPGA assesses every application against the twelve indicators of the DPG Standard. They cover:
- How the platform supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
- Whether it uses an approved open licence (ours is GPL-2.0).
- Who owns it (the Open Digital Cooperative).
- Whether it can run without depending on proprietary software.
- Whether its documentation is good enough for others to use it.
- Whether data can be extracted in open formats.
- How it handles privacy, open standards, and harm prevention.
We made the case against three sustainable development targets. Shared code lowers the cost of the basics (target 8.2). Smaller and less well-funded councils get the same quality of website as the largest ones (target 10.2). And the whole project exists to share knowledge between similar organisations (target 17.6), in line with the Local Digital Declaration.
It took more than one attempt
Will Callaghan submitted our application in January 2025. When the first reviewer worked through it in August 2025, most indicators passed straight away. Two did not: data privacy and security, and how the platform deals with inappropriate or illegal content.
The interesting part is that the safeguards already existed. We just hadn't written them down clearly enough. Our response pointed to role-based permissions for contributors, authors and editors, Drupal's security advisory process, and cookie consent tools. We also described the LocalGov workflows module, which moves every page through draft, review and publication, and sets review dates so content doesn't quietly go stale.
On 8 September 2026, the second reviewer passed both indicators and confirmed LocalGov Drupal as a Digital Public Good.
The lesson is a familiar one for open source projects. Good practice that only lives in the code is hard for anyone else to see. Documentation is a contribution in its own right.
Thank you
This recognition belongs to the community. That includes the many councils and suppliers contributing to LocalGov Drupal, and the individuals who turn up to drop-ins, answer questions in Slack and review each other's code. It also rests on Drupal itself, which is already a Digital Public Good and the foundation everything here is built on.
Thanks especially to Will for seeing the application through more than 18 months of review.
What happens next
Digital Public Good status is reviewed every year, so we'll be re-evaluated by September 2027. Between now and then, we want to make the most of it.
If you're making the case for LocalGov Drupal in your organisation, feel free to reference the status.
If you work in the public sector outside the UK and want to explore the platform, we'd like to hear from you.
Visit our Digital Public Good profile to see the full assessment.