We recently attended LocalGov Drupal Camp in Sheffield, where we met up with the community to talk all things public sector, open source and Drupal. Maria and Simon give a rundown of their event highlights.
Wednesday
The advance party left Oxford on a conveniently timed direct train. Fortunately, it was quiet, allowing for plenty of last-minute prep on the way up. After a much delayed arrival, we met the Sheffield contingent of Agile Collective, Chris, for a coffee and a brief historical tour of the City on the way to our accommodation, when we say historical - the history of Sheffield’s pubs counts, right?
Wednesday evening was the LocalGov Drupal Camp social at the National Video Games Museum, where we met up with Maria, fresh off her train from the Scottish Borders.
We had a great evening of drinks, (far too much) pizza and video games while catching up with friends old and new. After a brief detour to what must surely be the largest ‘micro’ pub ever, we headed back to our accommodation, ready for an early start for the main event the following day.
Thursday
As silver sponsors of the event, we arrived early to set up our stall, meeting long-time friend of Agile Collective, Code Enigma’s Phillip Norton, on the way for an early morning coffee. We also picked up the final member of the Agile Collective entourage, James.
Our now well-practised stall setup went well, with elements coming in from across the UK (thanks, Maria!). We had some lovely LocalGov Drupal Camp stickers designed by Agile Collective’s Rae and ethical chocolates from Divine. As the crowds started to flood into the main hall of the Owen building at Sheffield Hallam, we were excited for the day ahead.
Our highlights
Community fund update
Led by Product Lead Will Callaghan, we heard about the projects funded by the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund from the suppliers and councils who’ve worked together to deliver some epic new features:
- LocalGov Elections (updated in time for the recent elections in May)
- The famous prize-winning PDF importer
- A brand new module for publishing bus timetables
- An introduction to Consultations (see below)
We were inspired to try out some features we hadn’t explored yet and to pitch our own project to the community fund.
Building better with forms in LocalGov Drupal
Alex Sturtivant, Product Lead from Greenwich, kicked off his session by reminding us all of the importance of forms for Local Government. They are often the first point of contact for residents with a council and are used in high-stress situations. It’s vital to get these right.
Alex then gave us a tour through the work Greenwich has been doing, showing us their starting point of old, unresponsive, hard-to-use online forms through to their current webforms. The latter uses GDS best practice to deliver an excellent user experience, and he also included some great customer testimonials.
He went on to cover the backlog of items Greenwich wants to contribute back to the LocalGov Drupal community, as well as aspirational features they would like to develop in the future. The response in the room was overwhelming, a shared understanding of both the challenges and opportunities of this important work.
We worked with our friends at Walsall to deliver a similar project, and recently contributed those developments back into LocalGov forms, all ready for Alex (and others) to use.
From consultations to conversations
Our Oxford friends Webcurl gave us a demo of their new consultations feature. This new LocalGov Drupal module allows councils to publish and manage their public consultations and includes an integration with Mautic (an open source equivalent to Mailchimp). We got a demo of the features it already has, and a peek at the roadmap. Very good work! We’ll be demoing this to our council clients.
Anyone for an open source committee management tool?
Another brilliant pitch for collaboration from Justine at Chicken. Democratic Services within councils are required to publish information about their committees, councillors, committee agendas and minutes. The existing solutions have limitations and are not open source. Chicken is building an alpha version with Hammersmith and Fulham Council, but is seeking co-funding if that's something you are interested in!
Friday
Lots of exciting things went on at the first LocalGov Drupal Camp contribution day. We focused on the following:
Simon led a table working on issues in the LocalGov forms queue, with:
- Long-time Agile Collective friend and collaborator, Ekes
- Former client and all-round Drupal veteran Richard Sheppard from Walsall Council
- David Asch from Southwark (leading the user testing)
After the usual challenges of getting everyone working with the new Drupal issue queues and setting up a development environment for testing, we managed to make progress on a few key issues, including a first-time contribution from David. It was very satisfying to see some of the energy from the previous day’s form session turned into product improvements.
Maria led a table looking at accessibility. We ended up doing a demo of a few features to help the councils create accessible content. We also had a few folk pooling resources on creating accessible content and the training they run within the council. We’ll get this on the new docs site (which we worked on elsewhere in the room) as soon as we can.
