In late June and early July 2018, I was racing between London,
Cardiff and Birmingham, helping Linda O’Halloran, Egle Uzkaraityte,
Adam Thoulass and our colleagues in the embryonic MHCLG Local Digital
team to put the final touches to the coalition of 40+ councils,
government departments and public sector organisations that
co-authored the Declaration. We had crafted the Declaration in a
collaborative process over the previous few months, in workshops
hosted in rooms donated by GDS, MHCLG, the LGA, and councils like
Camden and Southwark, and debated tweaks to the language over drinks
post-Roadshow in Hackney, Bristol, and Leeds. I can even claim to have
written one or two lines of the speech that Rishi Sunak gave when he
launched the Declaration at the LGA Conference on July 4th 2018.
As we launched the new localdigital.gov.uk site, we found that
suppliers began to ask how they could sign up… and that led over time
to a strand of work that brought the supplier community into a
conversation about how we could work in ways that supported the
Declaration. I left the Local Digital team that autumn and joined
Placecube in December 2018, so it was natural for me to collaborate
with Alastair Parvin, Gary Todd, Euan Mills and others in drafting
a “Code of Conduct” or “Procurement Checklist” as
a way for suppliers to demonstrate their commitment and adherence to
the principles of the Declaration.
It’s great to see that this document has inspired others (most
recently Eddie Copeland used it to help form a proposed new
requirement for all LOTI borough tech tenders). As a new name in the
marketplace, Placecube has been actively designing the products and
services we offer, and our ethos as a company around a similar set of
standards and principles.
- Our subscription pricing will be transparent and fair
- We will not charge you a premium to integrate with our software or
any digital services we provide
- We will use and support open standards
- We will uphold the principles of data protection, security and
privacy by design
- We believe web accessibility is essential, always
- We will always seek to minimise the impact or disruption of any
change
- We believe you have a right to know how your service is performing
at all times
- We are committed to Place by design
How can we continue to support the Local Digital Declaration in its
3rd and future years?
During the past two years we’ve watched and amplified the news about
collaborative projects, and were pleased to be able to work with
Porism and Bucks council to prove that the recommendations of the
OpenCommunity project could be implemented in our Open
Place Directory – merging the original LGA Locally Delivered
Services standard data with OpenReferral to create the OpenReferralUK extension.
More recently we’ve seen great value in the work on open
source code-sharing led by Croydon and Brighton, and the
discovery and alpha into a potential open source Income
Management System.
These projects have begun to articulate the opportunities and
challenges in making open standards, open source options available as
a shared community and how commercial services might play a role in
enabling take up beyond the core of pioneers.
The MHCLG Local Digital Fund projects on code sharing and an open
source Income Management System have both underlined the importance of
active management of a core product, and the challenges of adoption
for the many councils across the country that have less capacity and
in-house technical skill. The IMS project in particular is exploring
how suppliers like Placecube could be part of sustaining a viable open
source product in future, offering services from hosting and support
to software configuration.
We see this as a natural evolution of the business model that
companies like RedHat and Liferay have made successful globally – make
the software openly available, invest in the community, and provide a
great service that helps customers adopt and use it securely.
In practical terms, the website, digital service patterns and
integration code we built with Bristol was reused by Camden.
Improvements we made with Camden were reused by Lambeth. Rugby and
Greenwich will benefit from the further development of GOV.UK design
system components we’ve done with Lambeth… and then as we co-design
and build new cubes with councils, they are cascaded back to all
existing customers. We’re currently working with a couple of councils
to create an open source Customer Contact Management solution as an
affordable, CRM replacement solution that is built by local government
for local government. This is our answer for the challenge of
spreading adoption of the great work that councils have co-created,
when they commit to a new way of working together, helping them to
amplify their resources.
Suppliers need to act with integrity and to be open to playing a part
in an ecosystem, rather than trying to capture every stream of income
from every council. They need to make APIs and services first class
components in their products, and include them in the price so that
councils stop having to pay for access to their own data. They need to
stop making the public sector pay twice for product development, and
instead support code-sharing and the spread of good service patterns
by making them openly available and easily adoptable.
If you want to find out what it’s like to use an open digital
platform, built on user research, that includes reusable digital
services co-designed with councils, and supports GOV.UK design
system styles, patterns and components, contact me gavin.beckett@placecube.com
Read the original article
https://www.placecube.com/localdigital2years-placecubes-support-for-the-local-digital-declaration/