 Prag 22 Lgd for local girl of Drupal Bit.ly Lgd Prag 22 I literally clicked on it earlier when it worked No? Interesting, let's try it Is it not working? Bit.ly Lgd Prag 22 Goes through to that for me Yeah I did It worked for you It works for Kostas so do what he did Yeah the slides If anyone wants the slides they are on bit.ly bit.ly Lgd Prag 22 Lgd for local girl of Drupal I realise that L might look like an eye in lower case or whatever Lgd Prag 22 Working for some people I can't help with typos Okay it's 1130 Let's go Is everyone here? Great So this is Rowering and sustaining an open source distribution in this case local girl of Drupal which is the distribution I've had the opportunity to work with over the last couple of years We've got what 45 minutes but I'm going to try and keep it down to about 30 so that we can have some Q&A because I think that's where the best value is So who am I? For those who don't know me I'm Finn I'm from Oxford, England I'm a Drupal developer delivery manager and technical lead on the local girl of Drupal project I've been working at Agile Collective since 2011 We're a co-operative working with Drupal for local government and non-profit organisations I also work as open code doing contracting You can find out more about Agile Collective at Agile.coop You can email me you can Twitter me You can find me on Drupal.org I have other passions other than local girl of Drupal which includes generally open source co-operatives, people co-owning their own business I think that's really important I love mountain biking and I love Zumba So tonight, Zumba, 6pm at Fit Top Centre if anyone's up for a dance I've done it every night this week so far so why stop now But my motivations for this talk mainly to share our experiences with other people and hopefully to learn from your experiences through Q&A and obviously to connect to connect with other Drupal suppliers who might be working in the area to connect with other open source communities already have some interesting conversations about Type 3 and to connect with people doing similar things maybe in other countries already heard from some people doing it in Malaysia Netherlands etc So let's talk to me after this or through Q&A So Drupal distributions Anyone who's new to Drupal who might not know what a distribution is it's a full copy of Drupal that includes core with additional themes, modules libraries, installation profiles to answer a particular need Dries mentioned it in his blog post in 2006 saying how important they are I mentioned it again this week in his Dries note so it's still very much a hugely valuable part of the Drupal community as is seen by lots of popular distributions such as OpenSocial for social networking, thunder for publishing a pinyo for learning management not actually tried that yet but I'd like to Vaubase for rapidly building your website saving hundreds of hours of work and local GovDrupal for councils in the UK which is what I will talk more about now So local GovDrupal it's the publishing platform created by councils for councils that's our pithy strapline there are now 30 councils in the UK signed up to use it they're not all live yet but there's a growing a growing community what it is I realised I hadn't really explained what it is so just threw this slide in at the last minute it's for the public facing websites for councils this is Westminster City Council running on local GovDrupal this is Whartham Forest and that's Cumbria over there so public facing websites for citizens to find out when the bin collections are coming or how to pay their council tax the aim is to make publishing better cheaper, more efficient more efficient use of tax payers money in the end so brief history how did we get here good call on the water of course so we have had a significant amount of funding from the UK government to get this off the ground in 2019 we had £75,000 to do a discovery phase this is all via the local digital fund at that point there were four councils looking to find out whether councils could share Drupal code the answer was yes which is good because that led to another £100,000 in 2020 to look at an alpha phase where we basically refactored code from Brighton and Hove City Council to make it fit for purpose for other councils to use in this case Croydon so that established two councils sharing the code and another four councils who were up for taking that code and starting to publish stuff with it fast forward to 2021 we had £350,000 adding more features scaling the project and the code but also looking at a sustainable business model because the funding is not going to last forever and 2022 this year we are working on microsites all councils have many little microsites WordPress, Wix, various technologies trying to bring them all into one platform built under local Drupal using domain access and group module I won't go into the technical details but it's super exciting still still in the middle of that and looking ahead to 2023 creating a non-profit organisation to try and nurture and grow the code and the community so we've had about nearly nearly a million pounds of worth of funding from the UK government not all of which has gone directly on development but lots of it in councils and other people's time to make the collaboration work but we're looking at growth really right now this is slightly out of date but illustrates the councils expressing interest and then eventually signing the MOU of understanding which is a non binding document that says we agree to collaborate work open source, work transparently and in good faith and so that's our sort of measure of people in the club as it were we're now up to 30 so actually we've got quite a few more expressions of interest but it does illustrate that the exponential growth in the expressions of interest leads to people signing up and ultimately to new life sites lots of councils participating if you're from the UK you might recognise some of these but some big councils like Westminster and Essex and smaller councils also from up north and down south as well as London and lots of lovely Drupal suppliers involved including Agile Collective from the beginning Anatech also working closely in collaboration Zutcher working with a number of councils Codenigmer providing demos and hosting to a number of councils in views, formerly in Veltra I think Big Blue Door so Drupal suppliers that we know of and creating a good community of Drupal suppliers part of the wider community so just the size of the community right now 30 councils 50 further councils showing interest 12 suppliers that we know of about 379 roughly people in Slack at the last count 12 live council sites and nearly a million pounds worth of investment so we have grown growth has happened but now how do we continue how do we sustain it because we're not sure whether there will be any more grant funding and if I'm honest I think probably not but so we're looking at what to do next in my conversations around this we've been lucky enough to have we are open co-operative join us in the last few months and this is Doug Belshaw he's previously worked at Mozilla Foundation and Moodle and is a really interesting guy passionate about open source, passionate about communities and he's helped to form some of the ideas that I'm going to share with you now one of the things he pointed me to was this book by Nadia Egbar seeing Jam nodding his head if you haven't read this and you're interested in open source communities it's really good published a couple of years ago I think Nadia used to work at GitHub and it talks a lot about the things that make a successful a successful community another thing that Doug pointed to was an architecture of participation so this is something that Tim O'Reilly coined I think in 2004 saying that the architecture of participation describes the nature of systems designed for user contribution obviously open source communities but possibly other systems as well Doug has since written about this and formulated a sort of eight pillar structure to the architecture of participation when looking at an open source community thinking about this I could have maybe created a more pillar based illustration okay Jam's talk just now which had a nice structure to it that'd be good we can just swap it out but anyway eight pillars we'll just briefly go through each one clear mission invitation to participate easy on boarding modular approach to the community and the governance not just the code strong leadership working in the open sort of non-worky back channels ways of being human and celebrating milestones so this has been really useful Doug's written about it on a couple of blog posts and we are open I'll give you links to that in fact there's a link at the bottom there but it's a useful lens through which to assess our community and how well we're doing to tackle through this clear mission basically I think we're quite good on this we defined a vision and a mission a while ago some of it's a bit wordy our vision is 100 councils collaborating on open source software based on shared evidence and user research so evidence based open source collaboration and 100 you know it's kind of we'll get there I think but it's quite visionary at the time we have a mission statement a bit more wordy to improve the digital experience through evidence based design and specifically an open source through for web publishing platform that's what we're doing at the moment and that's our current mission which may well change in the future as we fill that out and move on to other non-druful things but we're in a nice pithy strapline which is the first thing on the website that councils see the publishing platform created by councils for councils so giving it that kind of sense of ownership so I think in general everyone agrees they kind of know what we're doing as a community and as a project and as a product so I think we're doing pretty well on that the invitation to positive state this is where we want to get people involved in the community Doug likes to distinguish between passive invitations and active invitations highlighting that actually active invitations are going to lead to much more participation so passive invitations things like GPL things like having github open issues trackers people can just jump in and read it having a good first issue tag documentation but this all just sits there and people only find it if they want to so active invitations are things like saying hey we'd love to see you at the next technical group meeting to come and review your pool requests or see if you've got any problems or please could you provide a pool request to fix the issue that actually happened yesterday and it worked somebody else just rather than saying there's a problem they actually posted the pool request and that was merged and released which is great and specifically inviting people to join meetings so that it's in their calendar rather than just saying hey this is open to everyone say oh you should all come add to the invites and then people feel like actively involved so I think we're doing quite well on things like github and some of our meetings Merge Mondays is a regular meeting on a Monday that people come to to review merge requests and get pool requests that's open to everyone we're quite good at inviting councils to meetings and we have a product group and a technical group and those meetings are quite well attended but I think we need to invite more people to meetings especially suppliers because we've got 12 suppliers and there's maybe two or three who are regularly in some of the meetings and other ideas that we're thinking about reflecting on the wider Drupal community things like mentored contribution sprints get people who might want to get involved involved by setting a Friday morning let's jump on Slack and jump on a Zoom call and work out how, you know, where you might fit in also promoting the benefits of collaboration this is something Will mentioned yesterday when I was speaking to him Will being the instigator of this project sometimes people don't realise the benefits of actually collaborating or contributing or participating but actually highlighting that some of the people at councils who have worked on this have since said this has been the most professional development they've ever had by collaborating with other councils and participating in the collaboration of the project so I'm really flagging that up so yeah, various things we can do to improve I think on the invitation to participate easy onboarding this is one, isn't it people need to be onboarded into a community and into a system we have a great process for councils we get them to sign the memorandum of understanding this document that's non-binding but sets out the kind of terms of engagement we have an initial meeting with the product lead who's Will Callahan at the moment our benevolent dictator maybe for life maybe not a technical onboarding session with tech lead and developer for the tech crew signpost into documentation active invitations to participate getting people invited to tech group meetings and that kind of stuff and adding directly to Slack and Slack channels so this is going really well for councils and then I was thinking about suppliers and I went through all of these things and realised we don't do any of them for suppliers yet and that was kind of like oh right maybe that's why we don't have so many suppliers kind of like jumping into these particular meetings or indeed in the Slack channels so a lot of stuff we can do better I just brought us down to we're doing well onboarding councils we really should onboard suppliers I just did receive an email today saying that other people are working on an onboarding checklist for suppliers so it's already in progress and having spoken to a few suppliers here who are already involved and who might be involved soon it's something we're going to definitely improve modular approach so obviously Drupal is modular we love modular, we love people to be able to work on different things and have optional, carried optional features but that also transcends not transcends but transmutes applies to community and governance as well so oh look we've got two tiles left old one and a new one alright so we have something called sociocracy which is how our governance is structured essentially circle based governance rather than a sort of direct hierarchy and this leads to a kind of modular governance structure we have things you might expect a product group in charge of like product and product direction and roadmap and features, requests from councils and a technical group more in charge of delivering that, building it, overseeing the security performance quality control that sort of stuff in the middle we have a steering group where people are more engaged in the strategy and direction of the organisation and the community, the project as a whole and then off the end of it all around we have working groups which is usually time bound around a particular thing communications working group I think is probably not time bound but forms, publications, workflow work on and each of these represents a person so people will be involved in maybe just a working group or maybe a working group and the product group or maybe the steering group and the product group and there's links between all of the circles there's links to more about sociocracy in the slides actually there might not be but I can put some in but what the point of this is that different people have different skills needs, time aspirations and so when we see who they are, what type of person they are we may steer them to get involved with different areas of the community so again we are open to doing lots of work on this Laura Hilliger has developed this flow of different people to visualise people coming into the community they might be a designer they might start by reading the docs they might do some style guide stuff they might start doing some contribution and then end up coming into the product group in a design guidance capacity they might end up going into the steering group or maybe one of the sub-working groups product managers equally may end up in product group developers may be more technical group that's just a few but different types of people may well want to end up in different places so I think our governance structure really lends itself to that modular approach to the community similarly Slack channels there were groups for different groups channels for different groups so again technical groups steering group product group but also the actual working groups so the people can actually see what's happening jump into those if they want and get involved so I think that coupled with the onboarding helps to people to participate in the areas that they want to participate in or where they're going to be most valuable so we're doing quite well at product groups and working groups I think maybe more specific Slack channels might be useful there's a few gaps there we'd like to assess people's interests on boarding and maybe flag them up to particular areas trying to do a bit of matchmaking is what we'll call it so you'd be really good over here and you should talk to this person and actually just try and get people to engage in the places where they're going to have the most fun and more in-person meetings so when new people come and join actually just jump on a call with them jump on a Zoom call, have a chat find out where best they might fit so yeah more on that in the future leadership, it's an interesting one isn't it I mentioned Will a benevolent dictator for life he's great he started this all off he had a vision, he had a history of open source software he worked in government digital service at the UK he had lots of experience with Drupal working with Brighton and Hove sawed an opportunity not to reinvent the wheel had a vision, had a belief had good connections, very persuasive and managed to tap into some funding in order to make it happen so he really kicked it off and when the tender went out to say hey we're looking for a technical partner of course Agile Collective jumped at the chance and said this sounds great it also sounds like it really links in with our open source principles and our co-operative knowledge so this started to build out the leadership team in a way so Will plus people from Agile Collective adding a product lead well Will's product lead adding a technical lead adding co-operative governance experience and legal and open source experience in the form of Andrew Katz who's our favourite open source lawyer so he really started to distribute the leadership and strengthen it I think as we move up to Beta we've got more councils, more suppliers we've moved to the sociocracy in the circles that I showed you the diagram a minute ago we're a steering group with councils and suppliers on it so we're really starting to distribute the leadership and the power amongst people across a series of circles put some faces on here just so you can see that some people are involved in steering group and product group some people are technical group and steering group and there's these double links between each circle to really make sure there's communication and information flowing between the areas of the governance so that's kind of where we are I think looking ahead we'll probably continue this sociocracy but actually provide a bit more training to people in the community it's quite new to a lot of people I think it's important to understand some of the basic principles of sociocracy and decision making processes around consent rather than consensus allowing decisions to happen we want to define community roles a lot better again, Nadia's book is very specific around users, contributors, maintainers and how they're quite different in different communities and I'm kind of used to it from the Drupal community but we need to be specific about what it is within our community and indeed assign those roles to people because actually at the moment we don't necessarily assign maintainers to each project and we've got about 30 projects on GitHub so these are things that we can definitely strengthen the leadership and the distribution of the leadership and the distribution of power which hopefully will then empower contributors and maintainers to lead within their areas ideas for leadership 1.0 I guess once we establish ourselves next year this kind of structure can lead to a slower movement a slower decision making and this is something that Lambeth Council's pool Tate shared when we were discussing this and if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together so the idea that actually we might make better decisions if we take time to discuss them and hear everyone's voices and the eponymous Finlay Quay also said good things happen slowly bad things happen fast you said a lot of things but ways of working open so this is obviously intrinsic to Drupal and Open Source and indeed our collective in co-operative ways but openness and transparency are super important to us it's part of the local digital declaration that anyone working on a project which is funded by it should publish everything openly so that's been great from the start we do publish sprint notes share outputs from meetings regular updates at product groups technical group meetings and Merge Mondays are open to anyone so I think we're pretty good at the general transparency and openness all the codes on GitHub made that a bit more welcoming recently to kind of engage people and signpost them to different directions there's a roadmap on Trello which apparently needs a bit of an update but again just trying to be open and transparent to work and content strategy stuff with each other so again feeding that openness out to the participants of the project we've got open meeting schedules on the website so whoever can see where there are meetings and importantly we need a bigger link but a shared Google calendar so that people can go and see where meetings are find the links to those meetings and join those meetings without necessarily needing to be invited a passive invitation to participate but anyway that openness and transparency we're pretty good at something else we are open Doug mentions is openness is all well and good but without ambition no one cares so you can be as open as you want and no one's going to look at it if you're really ambitious and trying to do something really big and good but actually you're not very open then people get suspicious but if you combine the two people are excited and they want to get involved and so I think that's a useful thing to hang on to but we also need to sort of shout about our plans and be really ambitious so yeah we're doing well newsletter also got to show your work Slack channel that's actually really interesting councils regularly sharing their work but we want to improve things Roadmap I've mentioned be more responsive to our users I think issue queues questions in Slack sometimes they just hang around for a bit I think being responsive is probably part of transparency sharing information as quickly as possible and finances is a really interesting one something I think we're not I think there's information there that's available if you go and look for it but actually being actively transparent on our finances and how that's working there's something called the open collective which I recommend anyone to have a look at is a way to either host your fiscal sort of bank account stuff with them or host it yourself about where the money is coming from where the money is going and people could just go and drill into that and the visual representations around what's happening with your money which I think in a non profit organisation where money is changing hands is really important and especially in an open source community so worry up to backwater channels no I always say that backwater because I was just thinking of backwaters back channels and water coolers the non work kind of human interaction part also really important we do check ins and check outs this is part of sociocracy sort of culture beginning of a meeting everyone just checks in unless there's maybe more than 10 people and there's not time but in smaller meetings how are you, what are you bringing to the meeting well my cat's really ill so I'm a bit worried actually and I'm quite tired because and check outs you know how did the meeting go this really kind of brings people the sort of whole human to the meeting social meet ups we've done a couple got a local golf camp next week it's great because you get to meet people truthful meet ups in Oxford as well and various one to one check ins just quick calls with people actually one to one having a quick chat I think it really helps to bond people chat about things non worky things to work on more slack channels something just chatting to Anatech who we're working close with Mark we're saying they have book club exercise and wellbeing rant I'd love to see that channel foodies so maybe we should look at doing that kind of thing as well it may be slightly different in a company we're going to say space 400 slack channels of suppliers and councils but you know we'll see and social zoom calls just like a random zoom calls say hey we're just going to have a chat it's not about anything particular do you want to say hello I think these kind of things we can hopefully do and shared Spotify playlists interesting idea milestones we already mentioned the sticker on my laptop at the beginning everyone likes stickers project milestones, community milestones, personal milestones so yeah new releases should be celebrated we had a sticker for each sort of patch a stick mission patch for each phase of the project that's one of them on my laptop don't know where the others are actually community milestones hey we just hit 30 councils let's celebrate it in some way and then personal milestones someone's just got their zebra instructor badge or something like that something random so yeah stickers I think are great physical stickers but also digital stickers open badges has anyone heard of open badges okay so it's a thing I first heard about it maybe 10 years ago through Rachel Lawson at a dreamful camp Cambridge what I didn't realise is that do you remember that what I didn't realise is that at the same time a Mozilla foundation Doug from We Are Open was working on open badges on that side so he's super championing these and bringing these into the local Gov Duple community things like once you become a member you get a digital badge if you're on a steering committee you get a digital badge and so finally people are getting recognition for the participation they are taking and we can create our own badges as much as possible so I'm super excited about that there's more information on the We Are Open blog so do check that out so yeah architecture participation a really useful lens through which to look at various aspects of your open source community I think we're doing pretty well on lots of them and there's lots of room for improvement on some of them for sure one thing I didn't mention was a code of conduct this was highlighted at Anna's talk I think on Tuesday about starting the Lagoon open source community and it reminded me about our code of conduct which we do have thankfully on the website it comes from thecontributorcovenant.org which is a useful place to have a creative commons open source GPO starting point boilerplate for your code of conduct so if you need one quickly you can go there take it, adapt it and yeah it's important to have it in place before you need it I think because as communities grow if you have problems or if you get any bad eggs you need a structured process and a safe channel of communication to flag that so I'm super happy that that was mentioned on Tuesday and reminded me to mention it now money that's the other big one right so we had lots of funding so far and that's helped us get to where we are but that's not going to last forever so we're looking at developing a source of income over the next well pretty soon really hopefully by the end of the year what do we need money for though we need money for a community manager it's been in place for a couple of months so it's like early days we also need someone who's a product manager product lead to own that space and lead that we need a technical management technical know-how technical time as well as developers and communications people probably more but a sort of skeleton crew of probably part of time positions that does cost money and we can't really rely on volunteer help well solely on volunteer help or indeed from people who are employed by councils so what does this look like cost wise our current fag packet calculations suggest £200,000 a year to maintain the community and code as it is and just kind of keep on keeping on I think as it grows that may grow as well and roughly the same if we want to actually do active feature development like build a new I don't know like another microsites project or do a headless project or extend the product in serious ways so maybe £400,000 a year total is what we'd be looking for you know within the next few years and our business plan has got like a five year projection by which time we're we're looking to exceed that so we're setting up a non-profit legal entity maybe the local government people federation quite like the word federation named to be decided through which we can channel money in order to pay for some of these core co-ordination roles the mechanisms are council subscriptions so people who, councillors who are using the software to basically become a member of the local Gov Drupal federation supplier subscriptions similarly and maybe sponsorship from larger companies possibly further grants but the first two are ones that we're kind of more sure about right now I won't go over this slide in detail but there's lots of benefits for councils that we're kind of using to sell this concept into the councils and the decision making but mainly the kind of collaboration pieces seems to be what is actually most valuable to councils people learning from their peers and other councils good examples are like content designers who sit in a council writing content actually haven't spoken to any other content designers and as soon as they're collaborating with a few councils they've got peers, they've got a little crew of people they can actually share ideas with another thing that happened recently was the queen died the day before the queen died lots of people were in a meeting and said what are you going to do and they started sharing lots of information about what they're going to do should the queen die when she did die we noticed most of the local Gov Drupal sites responded like that with a full page banner ready to go and they had because they've been sharing information and because they've been collaborating on local Gov Drupal so interesting benefits to being involved in the community similarly suppliers lead generation being involved in the direction of the project as well so there's lots of reasons why you might want to contribute financially to the project so so far we have 12 councils who have pledged to contribute and 7 suppliers have pledged to contribute when we've got a bank account basically should probably be January which is £125,000 so far so that's pretty good on the way to our £200,000 keeping the lights on but not quite there however there's kind of pipeline of the 11 councils who have said yes there's another five who are asking managers another three who we consider likely so we can see that continuing to grow so I've got optimistic confidence that we're going to have enough money to carry on other models other sources of funding sponsorship from larger companies got a few companies already in discussion with sponsorship trying to work out what that means for an open source project so we've I guess accidentally recommending somebody's proprietary service just because they've given us lots of money so like working out what the balance there is of taking money, having logos on but in a sort of hands-off kind of way maybe grant funding for other specific features maybe donations from other members of the community this is something that actually I was quite interested in another thing that Doug from where I live put me on to he talks about small-dollar fundraising I think he was at Mozilla foundation at the time looking at I think once they're getting away from their grant funding or the grant funding died up and how lots of little bits of money from lots of people is much more stable, mitigates risk and there's also a meaningful contribution path for those who don't have time or capacity to contribute in other ways so while we're probably not talking about end-users in you know like sort of citizens like you know Joe Bloggs in Barnsley or something I think that's interesting to just think about that concept of lots of small amounts of money rather than fewer bigger amounts of money to try and develop a sustainable income stream I guess that's something that the Drupal Association obviously does as well through our individual memberships so income streams, council membership supplier membership sponsorship deals, grants smaller donations I think we've got some good options so my conclusions are from this that grant funding or seed funding helps massively with the growth of an open source project I don't think it would have happened quite in the same way or at the same speed without it the architecture of participation is super helpful to look at your community and assess where you might want to make improvements code of conduct is crucial of course and ongoing funding is important hopefully through a sustainable distribution of smaller amounts through these discussions this week have only just realised I guess that the local Gov Drupal community is just a microcosm of the wider Drupal community which is obvious I guess if you think about it but that gives me all of us great opportunity to look at the problems and the solutions that the Drupal community have had over the last 20 years and apply them to our smaller community and vice versa try things out in our smaller community and maybe scale them out to the Drupal community similarly to that the non-profi local Gov Drupal Federation non-profi I should say has a very similar aims and challenges as the Drupal Association on a different scale we're trying to raise money we're trying to look after an open source community we're trying to look after the tech behind the product and so I'm sure we've got lots to learn from the Drupal Association and similarly if we do things that actually work maybe we can feed those back up to the Drupal Association as well so that's really only just occurred to me in a few conversations with other suppliers and Drupal people here this week but yeah interesting so credits Doug and Laura at we are open check them out they've got lots of good stuff to say Erin Hirtensign and others are beloved community manager doing great work Mark Conroy, Eics, Maria, Young, Stephen Cox on the team of local Gov Drupal Dev and Microsofts in the moment always a joy to work with and great input into this talk Will Callahan our beloved dictator for life I hope Stella Power from Anatech has some good things to say as did Greg, as did Will from Code Nigma sorry I should say just because you're there, I was pointing you and Will Huggins from Zucho is another supplier lots of great input into the supplier side of the community so some links and references there if you want and yeah get in touch you've got contact details there might you work with other councils or local government in the UK would you like to get involved with local Gov Drupal anyway might you work on something similar in another country if you've only met a couple of people who do but I think that's a massive opportunity to collaborate between countries who have very similar needs you know let's not reinvent wheels let's collaborate in every way and do you see parallels with other open source communities like the typo 3 community or others so let's again learn from each other in that way so yeah that's it let's move to any questions if you have any does anyone have any questions do I take credit cards for Simba thank you for a great presentation seems to be a success story from the very start I was wondering if you have been looking what other countries are doing that have similar initiatives like in Germany and Australia and the second question is if a country or if someone let's say Norway for our case would it be interesting for us to start with local Gov distribution would that be possible or do you think it's better to start from scratch good questions so the first one did we look at other what other people are doing yes but maybe not until a bit late in the game so we looked at the Australia Government open source distribution I think at the point at which we were developing that was still on Drupal 7 and hadn't got Drupal 8 release and that was one thing we looked at DE Gov and I think that was less for local governments and more for institutions in central government and there was enough difference there that it wasn't necessarily directly applicable the other thing that happened was there had been built at a council in the UK and they had gone through all the design decisions invested in user research and invested a couple of hundred grand in building a website for Brighton and Hove and then they were going to do the same thing at another council so we had a model we had structures we had information architectures that were working and had been tested taxonomies that kind of worked and the structure of services is quite specific I guess in councils in the UK so we had what we needed we just needed to make it into a distribution and it wasn't sort of starting from scratch so it was easier to go down that route and refact to that code for reuse the second question would it work in Norway why not definitely the first thing is to try to have a look and see are there any fundamental architectural decisions that wouldn't work for a local government or a council in Norway I guess councils work in different ways in different countries so that's a thing but in our country all councils have been collections, all councils take council tax all councils have children's services and adult special education or need services and things that they need to supply and so similar design patterns work across them whether those same design patterns will work in a different country will be interesting to see but maybe the fundamental structures are good then the modular approaches is slightly different absolutely I think just another thing an extension to the question of applicability in different countries the microsites project that we're working on now is like a separate installation distribution based on a lot of the same fundamental design patterns content types in local government but it's for lots of different smaller sites and so that pattern I think would be applicable anywhere using domain access and group module to have one site that's controlling 70 of your microsites the specific designs of them I don't think we've brought in multilingual yet for example things to look at but I think that would be worth definitely worth looking at do you have a question over here actually my question was kind of answered because I'm in a weird situation having work in the UK but then living in France and I was wondering how applicable that would be to councils in other parts of the world which you've kind of addressed already but I think what would be interesting is what we were talking about is recipes so I think you can see a future for local government where right now maybe you get an install profile that has a load of stuff that you don't want if you're a French local government or something but in the future maybe that's the way things will go so if you're a French government or a Norwegian government or whatever you can actually say I don't want that and that and that because it's too UK centric but all this other cool stuff I'll have please A pick and mix distribution based on the recipes the recipes initiative distributions initiative streamlining what a distribution is by removing the profile which is a bit of a weird concept to allow multiple recipes to work together and we're looking at maybe trying that I might as well just do the techie follow up on that it already works as a recipe oh you've done it with what's there but it's already made so that you can install the modules without actually installing the profile so if you just want the directories just take the directories module don't take anything else and I think Anatech have already done the same with some Irish councils so yeah it has already been used in Ireland as far as I know is this someone from Anatech to answer that yeah it was a little bit late to the party here but how do you persuade political decision makers to onboard a project so how do we persuade councils to join us yes we show them a website which lists all of the things that they could possibly answer basically it does start with the website and we need to do a bit more proactive sales but the first thing is they come to the website they see there's 30 other councils doing it so they say hey there's 30 councils doing it and there's a list of savings I think for councils so look quotes from people saying improve service, save money, reduce risk, take control of your digital assets keep pace with change there's lots of good reasons to do it and there's lots of people doing it and love it when you've got thought leaders like Neil Williams who used to be head of Gov UK saying these kind of things it's quite a good sell really it's quite an easy sell and it's open source it's like they haven't got automatic what do you call it would you get with proprietary software a thing a contract I'm so out of the loop SLA obviously you can get that but it's a whole different thing so there is a problem with procurement there is a problem with convincing certain procurement at certain councils that actually open source is a thing still but some people haven't heard the news yet so it's a good question on this page and the page that you were on before the information that you need to do the convincing is absolutely there nobody wants to be the first and if a dozen are live and 30 more are coming I know it works for my peers and they can go and click through and they can call them because they guarantee they know each other and the most important thing on the front page if they're convinced that it can work is the cost reduction because everybody has a mission to be responsible with the money right now well and always I was also quite impressed because I have not been involved in this until I was impressed by the way the memorandum of understanding is written so it's kind of because it's non-binding but it is very encouraging about what it would offer and how it would offer it and it means that the higher ups just authorise the people who are actually doing the stuff to then go out and collaborate so once it's been agreed by the higher ups people can get on and do their job so by getting the councils to sign this memorandum of understanding is actually probably a really good way of doing it I think yeah absolutely more questions? representation first of all and it's a little bit maybe technical question I was wondering you have like 30 different councils on board at the moment and what happens if one of the councils ask for a new feature you know like yeah we want this and the rest doesn't so would you just provide that for that certain council and then I don't know build them differently or you just provide it and then open source it and add it to the 30 other and that's the first question and the second one is what's the routine and the process of deploying new features if we want to add a new one since it's a distribution you know so the first question is around what happens if a council wants a new feature hopefully somebody from that council will be part of the product group and will be discussing that feature with other people in the product group and usually what happens if there's a feature that is not there that one council wants there's at least one other council that wants it as well and that's super valuable to develop it because we're going to halve the costs right if there's only one then yeah maybe it's a discussion and you know do they have development and resource at their council what do they need help with and then we set up a working group around it so there's a feature we go okay this is wanted we've got some dev resource from your council we've put some dev resource from somewhere else you know people say how much time they've got somebody like each might say well actually that's going to take a few days work and so we kind of know roughly the sizes and we established a working group to see that through that will usually have some input from the product group and somebody from the technical group some council based people to guide the actual functionality and lead to kind of like user need and hopefully have some evidence for the feature that's something that I think we're trying to get better at documenting why it's designed in a certain way and then build it test it get it into the distribution either into the distribution or distribution as default if it's something that's just super needed like we want the wissy wig to be much better or accessibility controls across the board or if it's an optional feature have it as a kind of contrib module if you like or a contrib set of features to bring in so the answer is it varies but Walden Forest led on the workflow stuff and they had developers on their side and we had some input from our side but they provided a lot of resource and other guidance and just brought in this whole kind of workflow system so yeah it works it works so far what was the second question deployment of updates so we don't deal with any of the kind of like hosting or do you mean like so if do you mean like if the configuration is changing within our distribution that could be the configuration or a new feature or what not so imagine if you develop the new feature and you want to enroll it to all the 30 different councils you know yeah Eics can you answer that one so because it's based around modules if and and councils are encouraged if they want to change a content type or whatever there's guidance for the way to do it so we're just running literally just running updates to check to see if the configuration has changed if it's something that's agreed that it should go out to all the existing sites then we check to see if the configuration has changed if it has pushed it out lots of stuff it's just new stuff and it doesn't get pushed out and if people want to deploy it they need to add it to their site and then or it's a completely new module and it's for them to add the module and update it and that information is just shared actually using the Slack and using newsletters and people know that it's been in development in the product group but yeah stuff like the workflow went out and everyone but they had to switch it on the forms is a completely separate module it's not even gone into the distribution and it was developed largely by Croydon so yeah it's really more based on modules and it updates like modules would update and I guess there's that the kind of what you just touched on there is up to now distributions have been either sort of starter kit or sort of fully functioning and not meant to be changed so like open social on that end whereas we've been more on this end as a starter kit and assuming that people are going to evolve we're trying to get people 80% of the way there and then they're going to take it to where they need it to go and so not assuming that we're going to change much of the default configuration if possible there was one time we had to change field names and that was a real pain naming things about your internal community building the two most popular Slack channels at OSP are called Coffee Break which is memes and jokes basically and we have a gratitude channel so you know thanks Tracy for having the most awesome idea or helping me through my day or like oh my god the client said such and such to us so thank you John for taking care of that and we have a really we do a gratitude statement at the beginning of all the team meetings which comes from positive psychology but just saying thank you a lot is super powerful thank you that is really good and I think something I tried to channel in like contribution notes like the pool requests actually just like thanking people for it not just going yes great like saying hey thanks this is really great and it's going in but I think I like that idea of those extra channels and upping that game spread the love any further questions or should we ooh we got one over here so I'm from Malaysia so if I want to implement this in my country does the funding goes with it also so I agree or I mean what is sorry I'm just kidding so what is actually the best way to start if I'm from another country I mean it would be I have no idea what the potential funding sources from government are but this is something that the economists who are part of the ministry that provided the funding helped us to work up the business argument for how much money this would save the public sector by investing in open source and it was some of my earlier talks from maybe two years ago um Dupalcon remote or whatever it's called had some figures on that and you know I was looking at sort of saving 50 million euros over a sort of five year period and that was on the basis of maybe 30 or 40 councils or something the amount of money people spend on websites maybe in the UK not sure what it's like in Malaysia you know it's quite a lot and often we're doing the same thing answering the same questions at least maybe in slightly different ways so by bringing that into a consistency and sharing code the potential cost savings for the public purse are high so that's an argument for providing funding from the public sector in the first place to get these projects off the ground so I don't know if you have any contacts in central government or local government in Malaysia or if there's any similar types of initiatives where they're looking at funding open source projects to do things better and cheaper but that would be a really good thing to try and tap into and if not I don't know like why not try and start something try and find someone you know it just needs a couple of people I think Will said or Neil Lawrence said the first person has the idea and that's not the person that counts it's the second person who says yes that's a really good idea and then there's people that start the start of a community so find some other like minded people and start to make it happen and totally reach out to other distributions and stuff if you're looking at specifically doofal distributions to learn and collaborate from what we've done just like we have from Thunder and OpenSocial to make the tech side of it easier but it's good to try and get some funding and it makes sense so yeah good luck and keep in touch and see what we can do to help any more off any more or shall we go and do whatever's next thank you very much everyone