Things I learned from my time working with the Local Gov Drupal collective

Today (07/05/2020) is my last day at London Councils. It is also my last day actively working with the Local Gov Drupal collective. Now is a great time to reflect on the work we’ve done and the things I’ve learnt while working as part of the collective.

What is LocalGovDrupal

Local Gov Drupal is a collaboration to stop councils reinventing the wheel when building new websites. It creates opportunities for councils to listen and learn from each other.

The aim is to provide a better publishing platform, built on Drupal, allowing councils to build new sites, quicker and for less money. While generating mutual benefit from sharing our knowledge and resources.

London Councils joined the project last year and recently launched a beta site of our press content. We took the lead on the news module which is now ready for use by any council.

Collaborating for the greater good

One of the most important things I learned (and learned to practice) as part of the Local Gov Drupal product group was collaboration. The nature of the collective meant people brought goals from their respective organisations. We then worked hard to find common ground in the problems we were all trying to solve.

At London Councils we decided to address our press releases first. The work was started by Brighton and Hove’s City Council with their news module. We sought to build on this, tailor it to our users while making it easy for other boroughs to integrate it into their websites.

We talked to users from different boroughs as well as our own to develop a clear idea of what would be useful for different users. The need to publish press releases was common ground for both of us, but the intended audience was different. Our primary users are journalists who were likely to need to follow up on a story, and want to find our press officers contact details. Boroughs press releases are for residents who need more information about the content of the press release.

The news module we released to Github meets the basic needs for the borough’s and makes it simple for them to extend it to meet their specific needs. Building modules in this way allows other borough’s to easily take them forward in different directions. This is an approach to building features being taken by all member of the collective.

Keeping everyone in the loop

One of the biggest challenges the collective has is staying abreast of the work different councils are doing. We started off with one product group where all the features being worked on were discussed in the same meeting. Initially this meant if you couldn’t make a meeting you found it hard to know what other borough’s are working on.

We talk face to face every two week using Google Meet and have on-going conversations in Slack. To make sure everyone is on the same page during these meetings we work from live documents. We share the agenda before the start of the meeting and any participant can add to it.

As product group grows, we’ll be moving conversations about different features slack channels. The borough with the most interest in the feature will often lead on it and anyone else interested will be added to the channel. Anyone can join any channel. On each channel, contributors discuss a features user stories and breakdown how we think a feature might work.

Shared learning and taking the collective forward

The biggest benefit of having such a diverse group of contributors is the range of expertise. on a surface level this has meant gems of knowledge are shared as borough’s contribute to solving each others problems in the open.

As the Local Gov Drupal has moved into beta, we’ve sought to be more deliberate about sharing our expertise. This means boroughs can pick up skills that go beyond making better websites for less money. The first session we held was on using automated tools for testing website accessibility.

We followed up this session with one on using Github. This was primarily aimed at enabling boroughs to collaborate a on features across the project and make the most of the pooled resources.

The latest skill session was on GDPR and Cookies will be published on the Local Gov Drupal YouTube channel. Subscribe and click the bell to be notified about any more skill session videos :-)

While I am leaving the collective continues to gain momentum. For latest updates and if you’d like to get involved as a UK council or drupal developer, contact us on Twitter.

View the public roadmap — https://trello.com/b/6vuzkqZa/localgov-drupal-public-roadmap

View the project on Github — https://github.com/localgovdrupal

View the project on Drupal — https://www.drupal.org/project/localgov