AWS Public Sector Blog

LocalGov Drupal on AWS serves as a digital transformation resource for local governments

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Government organizations face challenges that include tight budgets and rapidly evolving citizen demands. They can address these challenges when they collaborate and share resources to accelerate digital transformation.

In the UK, 44 local government bodies—called councils—use an open approach to share expertise and pool resources to transform their web publishing platforms using LocalGov Drupal. The GOV.UK Digital Marketplace includes LocalGov Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, I explain how councils used collaboration and shared resources to develop this digital public infrastructure which has reduced the cost of building council websites by up to 80 percent and delivered better services.

The origins of the UK local council open approach to web platforms

The initiative was inspired by the UK Government’s GOV.UK website, launched in 2012. Rather than starting from scratch and working in silos, every department used the same building blocks for their websites. Just like central government departments, local councils provide many of the same kinds of services to citizens.

At Brighton & Hove City Council, in the south of England, I helped to build a website on the open source Drupal platform, a content management system used to run hundreds of thousands of websites worldwide. The platform is freely available, and though you need resources to set it up, this costs a few thousand pounds compared to traditional solutions requiring tens of thousands of pounds. You select the pieces you need, then build your own add-ons. Our developer suggested making the code open source to benefit others who could, in turn, contribute to web builds.

When I went to work with Croydon Council, near Brighton & Hove, they also needed a new website. Brighton & Hove council had already signed up to the Local Digital Declaration in 2018, which encouraged councils to collaborate on digital projects. The councils agreed that Croydon could reuse Brighton & Hove’s code. Croydon, in turn, would share improvements with Brighton & Hove. This was the inception of LocalGovDrupal. Funding from the Local Digital Fund kickstarted the collaborative effort, allowing councils to jointly build and enhance the platform while sharing costs. The fund allowed us to expand LocalGov Drupal between early 2020 and late 2021.

Councils collaborate over similar local services

Today, LocalGov Drupal is a cooperative whose members collaborate on projects, dividing responsibilities among members. For example, the Product Group meets monthly to oversee new features and improvements. This year, we’re focusing on microsites, accessibility, and editor experience. Before LocalGov Drupal, councils duplicated this work. Now we build once and iterate—a process made simpler by advances in cloud technology, which allows us to flexibly scale our technology.

Councils can decide how much they contribute, and their work benefits everyone. The members find the community as valuable as the product because it gives them a place to share ideas and learn from one another. They discover their common goals and activities—for example, providing information about services such as recycling or parking.

Brighton & Hove and Croydon are councils that are mature in their use of Drupal, with in-house developers. Smaller councils with fewer resources can still install Drupal for a few thousand pounds and hire an agency or freelancers to manage it.

Organizations other than councils are also interested in the ways of working we pioneered with LocalGov Drupal. For example, the Open Digital Planning project—a community of local planning authorities in the UK—built on our work and has about 70 councils involved in the UK. Local government organizations in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, France, and Nigeria have contacted us.

5 recommendations for local government collaboration

There are five steps local governments should take to reap the benefits of this kind of collaboration, including:

  1. Identify common challenges across organizations that would benefit from a collaborative approach.
  2. Establish transparent communication channels and shared governance to allow all voices to be heard.
  3. Adopt open source solutions and make code and knowledge public by default.
  4. Start small by pooling expertise and resources in a shared problem space.
  5. Nurture a mindset of goodwill and focus on the shared benefits of working as a community.

LocalGov Drupal’s story shows that goodwill, transparency, and the right infrastructure and collaboration across government unlock shared value. This is one way to address the challenges of tight budgets and evolving demands on government services.

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