Since 2018 the Local Digital Fund has provided over £16 million of funding and support to 61 council-led projects in the UK, including LocalGov Drupal, Open Referral, Local Gov IMS and Open Digital Planning. What can we learn from this and how can we replicate the successes?

Prerequisite
No prior knowledge required.

Outline
Since 2018 the Local Digital Fund has provided over £16 million of funding and support to 61 council-led projects in the UK, including LocalGov Drupal, Open Referral, LocalGov IMS and Open Digital Planning.

The conditions of the fund are set out in the Local Digital Declaration, requiring at least two councils to collaborate and explicitly encouraging working in the open and using open source and publishing open source. These conditions are crucial to laying the foundation for an open and collaborative approach to public sector digital solutions.

In this session we will explore the objectives of each of these projects, look at the successes and outcomes of each and reflect on what we can learn.

- Open Referral UK - https://openreferraluk.org/
- LocalGov Drupal - https://localgovdrupal.org/
- Open Digital Planning - https://opendigitalplanning.org/
- LocalGov IMS https://localgovims.digit

This session will demonstrate how important funding can be to help establish open source projects and lead to productive collaboration, increase innovation, reduce vendor lock in and generate tangible economic benefits for the public sector and ultimately citizens.

Learning Objectives
Attendees to this session should leave with a better understanding of:

- how public funding can help seed and nurture productive open source collaborations
- how the conditions of funding are crucial to establishing an open and collaborative culture
- how we need new innovative business models to continue to sustain open source collaborations when the funding runs out

Experience level
Beginner