LocalGov Drupal: A winning open-source CMS for Irish councils

It was an idea born of cooperative principles: build a website, share the code, pool the costs, and enjoy the benefits. Irish councils have truly taken on board the Government’s Build to Share initiative. Mark Conroy, Annertech’s director of development and leader of the front-end working group of LocalGov Drupal, explains why LocalGov Drupal is a win-win situation for both councils and citizens.

LocalGov Drupal is a collective of developers who write freely available code for councils to develop websites that are fast, effective and have a great user experience.

When Fingal County Council were looking to create a new website, they knew exactly what they wanted: something like the work Annertech had already completed for Limerick City and County Council. With the Irish Government’s ICT strategy and the Build to Share initiative in mind, Limerick freely signed off on sharing its code with Fingal. It made sense; the code had been developed and paid for, and Fingal’s digital budget could be redirected towards new features. This would be added to the code and then shared with Cork County Council.

Councils in the UK were developing a similar approach, which led to the development of LocalGov Drupal, a publicly owned asset founded on cooperative principles. Annertech became involved in the early stages to rewrite the entire frontend of the codebase and partnered with Invotra Consulting to take the service to councils in the UK. Now Annertech is bringing the solution to the Irish market.
Benefits

LocalGov Drupal is created for councils by councils. Councils typically share similar feature requirements for their websites such as news and events portals, council services, directory listings and search features. They also need to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards. LocalGov Drupal creates a best-in-class, fully accessible version of each.

The business case

LocalGov Drupal can reduce website costs by up to 80 per cent.

The costs are broken down on localgovdrupal.org but some areas in which councils will save are:

• lower development costs – £1million has already been invested in its development;
• fewer re-developments because LocalGov Drupal is constantly updated;
• new features and upgrades are free;
• no licence fees;
• no change request fees;
• building and maintaining subsites and microsites. This is the LocalGov Drupal focus for this year: satellite websites, perhaps for an event such as a film festival, St Patrick’s Day or a Christmas calendar;
• user research: councils can use the research that is continuously done and updated by the LocalGov Drupal working group;
• accessibility audits: the base theme is WCAG AA, providing fully accessible websites; and
• reduced service demand because citizens are easily able to use online services.

“Having been lead developer on Dublin City Council, Limerick City and County Council, Fingal County Council and Cork County Council, I’m using that knowledge to inform a generic LocalGov Drupal product.”

It is a community of shared expertise, collaborating on free-to-access code that follows best practice guidelines. The result is a solid, scalable solution that is open source, as are the new features that are added. Any council can use it, for free.

This is the way councils should operate: collaborating, building public assets, improving service delivery, and saving money.

Cost-effective

Because the code is available, for free, councils don’t have to start from scratch, and it stops repetitive spending on the same features. Instead, if a council develops a feature that could be used by others, they share it.

This shared feature set means the budget can be used on the look and feel of a website, such as fonts, colours, spacing, and logos.

Faster development time

Because the features a council typically needs for a website are built and ready to go, development turnaround time is faster. Creating a new council website can take up to a year. In contrast, LocalGov Drupal websites are launched in eight to 12 weeks.

Levelling the playing field

Local governments don’t have the same budgets, yet a small council has the same digital needs as a big one.

The LocalGov Drupal team is building a better product than they would have been able to build on a typical council website budget, and the team is far more extensive than any regular digital team: LocalGov Drupal has backend developers, frontend developers, product designers, interaction designers, content teams, content designers and user experience researchers involved with the project.

LocalGov Drupal offers councils access to this technology and team, so it is easy and affordable for even small councils to level up.

Conclusion

The Annertech team has vast experience when it comes to building council websites, including those for Dublin City Council, Limerick City and County Council, Fingal County Council and Cork County Council.

Given Annertech was tasked with writing the base frontend system for the LocalGov Drupal platform, who better to implement it on your council website.

About Annertech

Founded in 2008, Annertech has become the “go to” Drupal expert in Ireland and works with a range of clients in both the private and public sectors.

It specialises in developing enterprise Drupal solutions for clients, usually where there are complex requirements.

T: 01 524 0312
E: hello@annertech.com
W: www.annertech.com

For more on LocalGov Drupal, see: https://localgovdrupal.org