One of our favourite things about LocalGov Drupal is that it’s open source, done properly. You’ve probably seen agencies claiming they built feature X for LGD, (and to be fair, we did exactly that in our post about Eliminating PDFs). The thing is, nothing in the community gets built in isolation.
For example, the publications module was mostly built by us at Chicken, but there’s currently 10 people that have committed code to it and others who joined stakeholder workshops.
Represented in those 10 are:
- Chicken (that's us),
- Agile Collective,
- Open Code,
- Rohallion,
- West Lindsey District Council and
- Brighton & Hove City Council.
Some of these people are working on this on behalf of a client council. Some are working directly for a council. Some are working for the LGD project directly. Some are fixing bugs for other councils that mentioned their issues with the module on Slack, just because it’s the right thing to do.
We could have just locked ourselves in a room for a few months, smashed out the publications module ourselves, called it done and released it into the wild. But the thing is, if we’d done that it wouldn’t have been as good. It’d be the wrong solution, as the stakeholders that were involved early on to spec out what they needed wouldn’t have had the chance. It’d be buggy, as it wouldn’t have been tested in various council sites before it was declared ready for everyone to use. It wouldn’t be as well supported, as coding with reviews and changes from our colleagues in the community builds a product that people feel that they have a stake in and can contribute to.
None of this code is ours. It’s everyone’s, and it's better for it.