Earlier this month I attended LGR Camp in London, a get together of councils and suppliers who’re going through Local Government Reorganisation over the next few years.

Of the speakers, the stand out two for me were Kate Hurr and Madeline Hoskin, of Cumberland and North Yorkshire Councils respectively. They’ve both been through LGR relatively recently, and shared practical hard won advice. 

Both argue that councils need to collaborate more, particularly through LGR. We’re all meeting the same needs, there’s very little about our organisations that is unique. I totally agree. The questions for me are: what barriers exist to collaboration over the next few years, and how can we remove them?

Here’s a few ideas. It would be great to chat about who’s best placed to make progress on each one.

1 Share the technology everyone is using and challenges they’re working on

This sounds obvious, but one of the biggest barriers to collaboration is not knowing who’s using what, and the specific problems being tackled.

We sometimes struggle with this at LocalGov Drupal, even though everyone is essentially on the same stack. It takes time to check we’re talking about the same things. Is this [insert name] feature I need the same as what you need? Is it exactly the same or just similar? What are the common things we’re all trying to do, and what are the variations?

Across the wider local government software landscape, things are naturally more complicated. Happily, the Local Digital team at MHCLG is starting to build an understanding of local government software markets, while GDS Local is defining a common architectural model and the Government Commercial Agency (formerly CCS) has high level contract data for the sector.

By pulling this data together, it should be possible to spot opportunities for councils to work more closely together in future. During LGR, this ought to highlight collaborations both within and without new LGR boundaries. 

2 Provide opportunities for like-minded councils to talk

At LocalGov Drupal, we continuously bring councils together to collaborate on new features. Our dedicated Community Lead (Aaron, pictured below) and Comms Lead (Tim) run monthly community events, annual in person ‘camps’ and occasional dev days. They also publish newsletters and facilitate Slack conversations.

Council colleagues are time poor, so we’re conscious about sending requests – if we’re inviting you to an event, for example, it has to be worthwhile. There are many events for councils every year – maybe too many – so we’re careful about adding new ones to the calendar. Often we’ll sponsor existing events like LocalGov Camp, Gov Camp and LGR Camp rather than creating our own.

Separately, we provide an informal matchmaking service. Each of the LocalGov Drupal core team have hundreds of conversations a year with councils, so we’re able to connect people with similar interests. This year we’ve introduced people interested in using AI to cut the number of PDFs on their sites, producing a new consultations platform, publishing election results in an easy and accessible way.

Finally, there’s our Community Fund which encourages councils and suppliers to gather around specific projects, chipping in time and money as needed. Our biggest success to date is the award winning Publications Importer, and we’ve also collectively built modules for Elections, Consultations and a lot more besides.

Of all the public sector communities around I’m particularly impressed with Open Digital Planning. It’s professionally facilitated by government, providing useful spaces and activities for planning professionals to have meaningful interactions. It creates trust, provides training opportunities, and generates product ideas and improvements. It’s hard to imagine how the planning system could be improved without it. We need a community like this in every strategically important local government software sector.

3 Create collaborative building and buying opportunities

Councils ought to be able to collaborate as easily going it alone, and I’ve blogged about ways the sector can start doing more of this:

How to have a whip round

A new flatpack model for the collaborative sector

Introducing ‘software partnerships’

I’ve also started investigating new procurement frameworks, and PSS looks promising. More details to follow.

4 Encourage collaborative working

We’ve learned a lot of lessons about collaborative working through the LocalGov Drupal community. Here’s a blog post explaining the most important ones.

How to be a better collaborator

5 Government backing for ‘modern software’ and partnerships

I’ve got to the obstinate ‘Change my mind’ stage with this particular idea, sorry. 

Through Local Digital Declaration, and the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, the UK government has called for digital teams to ‘work together to create common solutions’ and created powers to approve data standards and software. 

I would like to see the government advocate and fund ‘approved’ or ‘modern software’ created by councils either building or buying together. Importantly, this software could be built by councils and be open source, or provided by vendors with proprietary code, but (I think as a minimum) open data standards and robust APIs. 

Ultimately I’d like to see a cross government ‘software partnerships’ team that handles market intelligence, product knowledge, vendor relationships, common standards, shared platforms and funding for best practice.

There’s a lot to learn from past government schemes such as the Local Digital Fund and recent Open Digital Planning software adoption and improvement grants. As a next step, the government ought to provide small highly targeted grants to help untangle sector specific adoption challenges and develop new models for the future.

6 Tackle further collaboration challenges

Doing the above should get the ball rolling. It will almost certainly highlight further adoption challenges such as the lack of time or support from senior managers, and maybe the nervousness or downright opposition to working collaboratively with others.

We won’t win everyone over immediately, and maybe some won’t get on board at all. After six years of sustained effort, still only one third of local councils collaborate with Drupal, for example. This shouldn’t dissuade us from making a start. Rather it should encourage trying different ideas more rapidly so we can discover what helps councils and their communities.

Comments welcome

As always, these views are slightly off the wall and wholly my own. My recent blog posts have sparked a few useful conversations, and I’m really grateful to everyone who’s shown an interest in this.

Please keep your thoughts coming, and maybe we can make some of this happen in time for councils going through LGR.