The publishing platform created by councils, for councils.

How We Work

At a high level LocalGov Drupal has:

  • A co-operative structure (Open Digital Cooperative) and board of directors, established to support,develop the project and ensure the financial sustainability of the project.
  • a steering group responsible for coordinating the strategic direction of the product and project
  • a product group of product and service owners which determines the overall direction of feature development
  • a technical group of developers which maintains the technical integrity and manages core releases.

 

The work is then carried out by individual working groups. 

Each council can participate in the working group, which are made up of representatives from council digital teams, plus outside experts who help to deliver some of the work.

See more about our governance structure. 

 

Working Groups

When a council wants to add a new feature to LocalGov Drupal they make a suggestion in a meeting or on Slack.

If there's enough interest in the feature, a working group is created. A working group is a collection of councils, at least two, but preferably more. Having multiple councils involved helps with understanding the problem from different angles. 

At the first meeting of the working group they set create an aim for the project, and decide how it will get done. For example they may decide to hold meetings or to run it entirely via Slack.

Once the feature has been developed, tested and accepted, it usually goes straight into the main LocalGov Drupal distribution, available to be used by everyone. 

For an inside view of the process read this great Medium post by Oliver Hannan of London Councils about working on the 'content lifecycle and workflow group', taking the proposed features through to sprint planning and onto discrete tasks for developers. 

[The collaborative governance] that's the beauty of it, I think of LocalGov Drupal, is that it's something that we're doing in partnership with everyone, it is a collaboration of councils. So you know, you don't just get stuck on your own. You've got other great minds out there saying, ‘oh, have you tried it this way?’ Or, ‘shall we do such and such?’ ‘Yeah, we have that too’ ‘you guys can work on that and we can do this’. And then it all just comes together.
Angie Forson, Senior Content Designer, Croydon

Active Working Groups

All of the working groups have Slack channels which you can join if you have an interest. It's not just developers and product owners who are involved, content designers are encouraged to join to provide advice and testing. 

You can find the product feature roadmap here, with details on who is working on what. 

The current working groups are:

  • html publications (replacing PDFs) 
  • microsites/ headless

Proposed groups that already have some discussion on Slack or actual development work include:

  • smart answers
  • Intranet
  • Directory enhancements

 

If you would like to find out more or have any questions just drop us a line at hello@localgovdrupal.org. We are always happy to chat about LocalGov Drupal, provide a demo of the platform, or show how councils are using it.

Normally, you just have to put up with stuff that doesn't work, but with LocalGov Drupal, I tell the product group, they discuss it, if they want to change it, they'll fix it, there'll be a release, so then the thing I don't like will be fixed. I've pretty much never experienced that before.