I’ve mentioned the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund a few times now, so here’s more info on how it works and what we’ve learned so far.

It’s a great time to talk about it, because last week the fund had another major success. Three council Democratic Services teams switched from using their old software to the latest version of LocalGov Drupal Elections, paid for by contributions from our community. Have a look at election results for Croydon, Newcastle and Walsall.

We’re on a roll at the moment. Last month our friends at Southwark and Chicken won an award for another Community Fund project, an AI powered PDF importer. 

The Community Fund was originally an idea to see if councils would pull together to fund specific projects. It feels like it’s doing some good.

How the Community Fund works

As I’ve mentioned before, LocalGov Drupal is funded in two ways. The first is an annual subscription fee – voluntary for councils, mandatory for Drupal suppliers.

The second way is the Community Fund. It’s a series of whip rounds for specific projects, a lot like Kickstarter. We’re continually listening to people in our community talk about the work they’re already doing, and the projects they’d like to take on in future  – from small jobs to moonshots. As Product Lead, one of my jobs is to help work up these ideas into costed proposals that anyone in the community can back. Once the total cost of the project is raised, the work can start and the code is open sourced so everyone benefits. 

Projects are either ‘hands off’ where councils and suppliers work together without involving our core team very much, or ‘hands on’ where we play more of a co-ordinating and quality role.

For ‘hands off’ projects, all of the money goes to the team who’re building it. For ‘hands on’ work, the LGD core team takes a small percentage to cover product and technical help, QA and documentation as needed. 

Sometimes councils transfer money between themselves to cover the cost of work. As the projects are relatively low value, there’s also an option where councils pay the Open Digital Cooperative (the legal entity that supports LocalGov Drupal’s development) and we pay everyone concerned.

What we’ve learned

1 The fund boosts collaboration

The Community Fund is probably the best single idea for encouraging collaboration we’ve had so far, aside from maybe LocalGov Drupal itself.

We all know the barriers to councils working together (including time, culture, the sheer difficulty of working with other organisations that have different tech and priorities), but the fund seems to cut through a lot of this. 

It creates ongoing opportunities for councils to collaborate with each other, and just by doing that it overcomes many of the challenges councils face doing this kind of work. Generating your own opportunities is too time consuming, or is seen as ‘too hard’. Joining someone else’s collaborative project is easier, as long as it’s seen to be effective, efficient and delivering something useful.

Rather than getting a group of councils together to work up a specification (or argue over it), the Community Fund does the reverse. We specify the work and the objectives up front, based on our understanding of the challenges involved, and selected conversations with suppliers, product people and subject matter experts in our community. Once a proposal is written, we invite organisations to buy in. Occasionally we’ve needed to include a further design round with interested parties to iron out unknowns and questions.

Having a ‘shovel ready’ proposal, and a previous working version of Elections was enough to get buy in from three councils, which was all we needed to fund the next phase of work and keep the project moving forward.

Our track record of delivery with LocalGov Drupal and previous Community Fund projects also played a part. Without our community and the fund, the Elections collaboration would never have happened.

2 Start small and grow

Every Community Fund project so far has started small with a handful of councils pledging time and money, quickly creating working code they can all use. 

It’s obviously quicker and easier to secure financial backing and support from a few councils than lots of them. This means we’re able to understand needs and ship new features regularly, and that fuels further interest in the Community Fund.

There’s two issues worth bearing in mind here. First, we need to do our best to ensure the councils supporting any specific project are representative of the community as whole, so that the things we build are useful to most of our users. To date, we’ve found this working a lot like the “5 user rule” for user testing. Up to five representative councils seems to be good number to move quickly while learning enough about the problem.

The second issue is related to the size of project we’re able to fund this way.. We obviously want to keep financial pledges doable for all councils – up to £15k seems to be affordable for most and relatively easy to secure. With five councils as an optimum number of project partners, this sets a budget ceiling per project of £75k. Our largest Community Fund proposal to date is asking for around that amount, and we’re watching closely to see how this goes.

Match funding from something like the now closed Local Digital Fund would make a difference here, but that currently seems to be counter to government policy. 

3 Pick the right projects

As LocalGov Drupal does a decent job of providing the basics of web publishing, our community seems to have moved on to software that’s adjacent to us. There’s a lot of relatively poor and/ or expensive systems outside the domain of a typical council content management system like Elections, FOI logs, Consultations, Committee Papers for councillors, analytics and insight tools. These seem to be ripe for Community Fund projects – we either have done work on everything listed, or have proposals coming soon.

It’s worth thinking about the software used elsewhere in the public sector. What are the niggly, annoying and expensive systems you’ve had to suffer for years? They’re probably too expensive to rebuild on your own, but teaming up with other councils could make this possible. 

Also it’s worth remembering there are more ways of delivering software than hiring an agency to build it for you. All of these ideas apply equally to buying off the shelf from a vendor. As a group of councils with shared ideas and a pot of money, you could a lot of good for yourself and others. Most vendors will probably thank you for all pulling in the same direction.

4 Widen collaboration beyond digital teams

We’ve found from the Elections project that council Democratic Services teams can be encouraged to get involved in LocalGov Drupal work. In one of the councils above, we’re told that colleagues now love our software and want to know more. 

Following the list of software mentioned in 3), the Community Fund ought to foster collaborative projects across the wider council. Many teams run Consultations for example, so the fund could be a way to introduce collaborative ideas more broadly.

5 Provide funding for more suppliers long term

The Community Fund has also brought work to a wider group of Drupal suppliers across our ecosystem. Larger suppliers tend to win council builds, and there’s a risk that smaller suppliers are left out. With the fund in place, there’s a lot of interesting smaller projects up for grabs, and that’s a win for everyone.

Thanks

As always, thanks to many people from different organisations for working together to make this happen. 

The Elections project mentioned throughout this post was created by Dan and Duncan at Rohallion with funding from Cumberland and Walsall councils and the core team. Victoria and Adnan at Croydon council provided product oversight and developer time in kind. Design maestro Dave Hampton did a brilliant job as usual. 

LocalGov Drupal technical lead Finn and developer Tony pulled out all the stops in assuring the work well ahead of the 7th May deadline. Community lead Aaron and Comms lead Tim continue to broker important connections and champion the work.

It’s a real pleasure working alongside such talented and visionary people. We have more Community Fund projects coming up, so please have a look and pledge your support.