UK & European Council Collaboration / Follow-up to DrupalCon London Gov BoF

At the recent DrupalCon London Government BoF kindly organised by Mike Gifford I raised the point that there seems to be a growing number of councils in the UK using or looking into using Drupal however there doesn't seem to be much collaboration between neither the councils themselves or any outside suppliers who are providing them with Drupal-related services.

The issue here is it's great to get councils using more Free/Libre Open Source Software but if they all end up with completely different systems then we are really in not much better position than previously so I suggested we need to have a neutral space where those using Drupal and those not using Drupal yet can so we can begin to take stock of the current situation.

I am talking here about somewhere we can start finding out what software is being used in councils and who is using it as once we find that out we can start seeing where we can make a bigger impact and perhaps start tackling some of the issues so we don't end up paying a large amount of our taxes on software licenses and generally lower the cost of IT for councils.

My original idea for this came up as I am currently helping Brighton & Hove Council on the road to Drupal adoption and Jack McAngus from the council, who also attended the BoF, mentioned a few pieces of software they were planning on re-writing using Drupal but they wouldn't be able to look at it yet. I said even so, they should start to talk to the community about what they plan to do as even if there are only another three councils using the same software you're potentially quartering your costs and quadrupling the team you have to do this with. According to the Department for Communities and Local Government there are 353 councils in England. These 353 councils fall into 3 categories:

• 125 unitary authorities (including metropolitan and London borough councils), in general providing all local government services to their areas. These cover approximately 16 per cent of the country by area, and 53 per cent by population – mainly in the cities, urban conurbations and larger towns
• 27 county councils in two-tier areas, providing the major services (education, social services, waste disposal) to 84 per cent of the country by area and 47 per cent by population - mainly in rural areas
• 201 district councils in two-tier areas, each county council area is subdivided into districts, for which there is an independent district council responsible for local services such as refuse collection and planning control.

There's a lot of similar functionality required for councils and in the BoF we talked about how we could best approach providing solutions for these. We talked about the OpenPublic distribution however agreed that the way things work in the U.S. is very different to how things work in the UK. The way things work in countries in Europe is also different, however there seems to have been more Drupal work done in Europe than the UK so we can perhaps learn from the work they have done so far as I'm sure some of it will be relevant if not down to the specific syntax.

After discussing some of the issues with providing distributions it was recommended that the way forward would be to go down the 'App' route so that we can provide specific functionality which can be 'slotted in' to an existing Drupal install. There is a lot of discussion going around the Open App Standard which is relevant for us here.

With only a handful of councils currently implementing Drupal I think there is a huge opportunity here and one which will also make the world a better place, which is always a Good Thing!

My current thinking is there needs to be a separate site for this we can publicise and get people to join in - something to provide a front-end to the discussions we have here as gdo is not very user-friendly for those not involved in Drupal, and of course we must consider the fact that not everything can be done with Drupal and there are other opportunities for opening up the software within UK councils further. There is a Drupal group on the Communities of practice site but also fairly quiet.

Would like to get people's ideas on how we can start to collaborated more, and promote freedom to the outside world so we can get civil servants and the public behind us for what is basically a massive task ahead!

I'll get the ball rolling, I'm currently making a small distro for the council based on the work that's being done on the Build Kit for every site discussions so they have a starting point to build their main website from. We plan to also make a distro which will be given to local suppliers who are building micro-sites, but that's more of a mid-longer term concept. I like the idea of plug-in apps so will be looking into how we can approach the issues we will come up with from an app point of view.

Here ends thine brain dump!