Paul Zimmerman
INV Group Chief Communications Officer
15 June 2026
LGD Camp in Sheffield was a reminder that the future of local government digital services will not be solved council by council, supplier by supplier, or platform by platform.
It will be solved through shared standards, shared code and shared commitment.
There is a particular energy that comes from seeing people solve common problems together.
At LocalGov Drupal Camp in Sheffield, hosted on the campus of Sheffield Hallam University, that energy was everywhere. Council digital teams, developers, product specialists, suppliers and community contributors came together not simply to talk about websites, but to work through the practical realities of modern local government digital delivery.
This was also a significant moment for the LocalGov Drupal community itself. It was the first LGD Camp to be hosted over two days, reflecting the growing scale, ambition and maturity of the project. With more than 75 councils now using LocalGov Drupal, this is no longer a niche initiative. It is becoming one of the most important open-source digital movements in UK local government.
That does not happen by accident.
The success of LGD Camp was a credit to the people who organised and ran it, and especially to the LGD Core Team. Will Callaghan, Aaron Hirtenstein, Finn Lewis and Tim Hunt were instrumental in making the event such a success. Their work, along with the wider contribution of the community, created the conditions for two days of practical collaboration, shared learning and visible progress.
The conversations ranged from AI governance and PDF importing, to Drupal Paragraphs, microsites, analytics, intranets and the specific demands of Local Government Reorganisation. They were not abstract debates. They were grounded in the daily challenges that local authorities face when trying to deliver better, more accessible, more sustainable digital services for residents.
The real value of LocalGov Drupal is not only that it provides a shared publishing platform for councils. It is that it creates a shared environment in which local government can identify common problems, agree sensible patterns, build reusable solutions and strengthen open standards over time.
That is what makes the LGD community so important.
Local government has common problems. It needs common patterns.
Every council is different. Each has its own geography, political context, service pressures, legacy systems, resident needs and budget constraints.
But many of the digital problems councils face are strikingly similar.
How should service content be structured? How can councils improve accessibility while reducing content duplication? How should PDFs be handled when they remain deeply embedded in operational processes? How can analytics be made meaningful across large, complex council websites? How can new AI-enabled services be deployed safely and governed responsibly? How should a council website adapt when Local Government Reorganisation changes boundaries, responsibilities and service models?
These are not problems that should be solved repeatedly in isolation.
When each council has to start from scratch, time is wasted. Money is wasted. Good work is duplicated. Lessons are lost. Standards fragment. Suppliers build similar things in slightly different ways. Residents ultimately pay the price through inconsistent, hard-to-use digital services.
The power of LocalGov Drupal is that it creates a different model.
It gives councils a shared foundation. It allows local authorities to collaborate on the things they have in common, while still retaining the flexibility to meet local needs. It turns individual council challenges into community-wide learning. It turns one-off fixes into reusable modules, patterns and practices.
That is how open standards become real.
Not through documents alone, but through working software, shared governance and active contribution.
LGD Camp showed the community model in action
At LGD Camp, the community came together in exactly this spirit.
In product roadmap sessions, participants discussed the practical priorities facing councils now and in the near future. These included the role of AI governance in council web environments, how PDFs are imported into Drupal, how teams are using and improving Paragraphs, and how LGD can support councils going through Local Government Reorganisation.
There were also discussions around the perennial challenge of site metrics and analytics. This is an area where local authorities often struggle to move from basic reporting to meaningful insight. Councils need to understand whether residents are finding what they need, where journeys are failing, which services are generating avoidable contact, and how content changes affect outcomes.
That is not just a reporting issue. It is a service improvement issue.
The same applies to the idea of an LGD intranet. Many councils face the challenge of supporting internal staff with clear, accessible, well-governed content. If LGD can help provide stronger intranet patterns for local authorities, then the benefits of the community model could extend beyond public-facing websites and into the internal operating environment of councils themselves.
What stood out was not just the range of subjects being discussed. It was the way they were being discussed.
These were not supplier-led sales conversations. They were community-led working sessions. People were bringing real problems, real constraints and real experience to the table. The aim was not to produce another layer of complexity. The aim was to make things easier, safer and more reusable for everyone.
AI search needs governance, not just enthusiasm
One of the clearest examples of this was the discussion around AI search.
Our own INV Group CEO, Fin Galvin, gave a practical, non-technical session on what it means to govern AI search within a LocalGov Drupal environment.
This is an important subject for councils. AI-powered search has the potential to improve how residents find information, navigate services and interact with council content. But it also introduces real questions around accuracy, accountability, transparency, data protection and operational risk.
For council web teams, the issue is not simply whether AI search can be deployed. The issue is whether it can be deployed safely, responsibly and with the right governance wrapped around it.
Fin’s session focused on the questions councils should ask before deployment. What content will the AI search draw from? How will answers be checked? What happens when information is uncertain, incomplete or out of date? How will risks be recorded? Who signs off the use case? What does the Data Protection Officer need to see? How are decisions documented in a way that provides assurance later?
This is exactly the kind of practical governance conversation local government needs.
AI adoption in councils will not be sustainable if it relies on enthusiasm alone. Nor will it succeed if governance becomes so heavy that nothing can move. The right answer is a lightweight, proportionate process that helps teams understand risk, document decisions and create confidence.
That is where LGD’s community model can be especially powerful.
If councils are all beginning to ask similar questions about AI-enabled services, then there is a strong case for shared patterns, shared documentation, shared risk models and shared governance approaches. AI governance should not be reinvented separately by every council web team in the country.
The Community Fund is turning shared problems into shared assets
One of the most encouraging parts of LGD Camp was hearing more about the Community Fund.
The principle is simple and powerful. Councils and partners contribute towards solving common problems. The resulting work benefits not just the organisation that helped fund it, but the wider local government community.
Since its launch around 18 months ago, the Community Fund has already delivered a range of useful features, including the award-winning AI publications importer, multi-seat Elections, Bus data and Consultations.
That is a serious achievement.
It shows how the LGD community can move beyond discussion and into delivery. It also shows why open-source collaboration is so well suited to local government. A council may have a specific need, but that need often reflects a wider pattern across the sector. By contributing to a shared solution, one authority can help itself while also helping many others.
Southwark Council’s contribution to a project that then benefited other local authorities is a strong example of this model in practice.
This is not charity. It is strategic collaboration.
It is a way of stretching limited public sector budgets further. It reduces duplication. It improves consistency. It allows good ideas to spread more quickly. It builds capability across the community. It also gives councils more influence over the digital tools they depend on.
That matters because local government should not be locked into closed models where common problems are solved privately, priced repeatedly and learned slowly.
The Community Fund points to a better way.
Contribution Day showed the discipline behind the community
The second day of LGD Camp was Contribution Day. This gave the two-day format real purpose. Day one created the space for discussion, learning and direction-setting. Day two turned that energy into practical contribution.
Developers joined forces to add features, improve modules, fix bugs and support new contributors in getting up and running with Drupal. That onboarding element is important. Open-source communities do not sustain themselves by accident. They need pathways for new people to contribute, learn the standards and become productive members of the community.
INV Group was pleased to contribute directly, with Max Lovric working on bug fixes for LGD microsites.
This kind of contribution may sound small compared with the bigger strategic conversations around AI, Local Government Reorganisation or analytics. But it is the foundation that makes everything else credible.
Open standards only work if people maintain them. Shared platforms only succeed if contributors continue to improve them. Community-led digital delivery depends on the unglamorous but essential work of fixing, testing, documenting and refining.
That is what Contribution Day represented.
Not just a hack day, but a visible expression of community stewardship.
LGD is becoming infrastructure for collaboration
The more you look at LocalGov Drupal, the clearer it becomes that its significance is not limited to websites.
LGD is becoming a form of collaboration infrastructure for local government.
It gives councils a place to converge around shared service patterns. It gives suppliers a clearer framework for building in ways that benefit the sector, not just individual contracts. It gives developers a route to contribute to something with public value. It gives digital teams a way to draw on the experience of peers facing similar challenges.
This is particularly important at a time when local government is under pressure from multiple directions.
Budgets remain tight. Resident expectations continue to rise. Accessibility requirements are rightly demanding. Legacy technology is still a burden. Local Government Reorganisation will create major structural and digital challenges for many authorities. AI will introduce both opportunity and risk. Data, content and service design will all need to become more joined up.
No single council can solve all of this alone.
The LGD community offers a practical model for shared progress.
It does not remove the need for local leadership. It does not pretend that every council is the same. But it does provide a way for local authorities to collaborate on the common foundations, so they can focus more time and energy on the needs that are genuinely local.
Open standards are built by people who keep showing up
It is easy to talk about open standards as if they are purely technical artefacts.
They are not.
Open standards are social as much as technical. They require agreement. They require trust. They require governance. They require people to keep showing up, sharing lessons, challenging assumptions and doing the work.
That is what LGD Camp in Sheffield demonstrated.
The strength of LocalGov Drupal is not just in its codebase. It is in the councils that use it, the developers who improve it, the product groups that shape it, the community funders who back common solutions, and the contributors who fix the bugs that make the platform stronger for everyone.
It is also in the people who organise, steward and sustain the community. Events like LGD Camp require care, planning and leadership. The work of Will Callaghan, Aaron Hirtenstein, Finn Lewis, Tim Hunt and the wider LGD community deserves recognition, because they are helping create the conditions in which local government can collaborate more effectively.
For local authorities, this is a model worth investing in.
For suppliers, it is a model worth respecting.
For residents, it is a model that can lead to better, more consistent and more accessible digital services.
And for INV Group, it reinforces something we believe strongly: the future of public sector digital delivery will be built through open, governed, collaborative systems that help organisations move faster without losing control.
LocalGov Drupal is showing what that can look like in practice.
The next opportunity is to take that same community spirit into the next generation of challenges: AI governance, service analytics, intranet patterns, content quality, Local Government Reorganisation and the safe adoption of emerging technology across local government.
Because when local authorities solve common problems together, everyone benefits.