The power of community: Our highlights from LocalGov Drupal Camp 2026

For this year’s edition of the LocalGov Drupal Camp, Annertechies joined the LGD community at Sheffield Hallam University for two days of sessions, socials and contribution. 

LocalGov Drupal (LGD) is a collaborative, open-source web publishing platform built by councils for councils, and this flagship camp is where digital teams and suppliers meet to share knowledge, celebrate achievements and build better public services together.  

The opening of the World Cup coincided with the camp this year, and rainy Sheffield was in stark contrast to the climate in Mexico City. Happily, the LGD community knows how to bring their own vibes and sunshine wherever they travel. 

The pre-match entertainment was a visit to the video game museum, where LocalGov Drupalers had the chance for an informal catch up, chat and some pizza whilst busting out their best Donkey Kong and Sonic moves.

Day one: sessions  

Day one was packed with sessions, covering the full spectrum of lived experiences and engineering topics from people of all disciplines including council teams and Drupal engineers. 

As a Gold Sponsor of the event, we had our own booth, which gave Managing Director Stella Power, Director of Projects Mike King, and Account Managers Josh Chamberlain and Sav Monzac the perfect spot to meet people and catch up with some of our clients, including the Solihull Council team. 

The LGD sessions are always inspiring and spark debate and conversation. Here are some of our highlights: 

Community Fund projects 

Community Fund projects are a way for councils to come together to contribute funding for new and improved features. Past successes include the Publications Importer and Elections modules. 

As the project grows, the core team has been putting more structure around how these projects are scoped so they are baked ready to release and maintain. 

Product Lead Will Callaghan led a session on the Community Fund and introduced Project Quorum. It is an ambitious new governance tool designed to do the heavy lifting for local councils, covering pretty much everything a Democratic Services team needs to keep committees and public meetings running smoothly.

“It was inspiring to listen to the fund ideas,” said Stella. “The Community Fund is the absolute heartbeat of LocalGov Drupal. It allows councils to pool resources to build features that benefit everyone, effectively democratising digital innovation in the public sector. It is the ultimate expression of the 'build to share' ethos that we champion at Annertech.”

From Zero to Beta to Live in 180 days(ish) — Jayvik Patel

Jayvik showcased the new Luton Borough Council platform, developed by Annertech.

Luton completely transformed its digital presence, moving from an outdated legacy system to a modern, user-centred platform built on LocalGov Drupal. Working at pace, the team launched a public beta in just 11 weeks, with the full website officially going live only 14 weeks later.

“I really enjoyed Jayvik’s presentation,” said Stella. “What the Luton project proves is that moving to LocalGov Drupal doesn’t mean sacrificing speed for quality. Going from a complex legacy system to a live public beta in three months shows what is possible when you pair an ambitious council with a powerful, open-source framework and an agile team.”

Testing your mettle: an introduction to testing on drupal.org — Finn Lewis

Finn set himself one target for the session: convince at least one person in the room to start contributing to automated testing. Effective testing enables the maintainers to push updates out to 73 council sites (plus all the Microsites) with confidence. Finn went over local testing in DDEV (phpcs, phpstan, PHPUnit), the move to drupal.org with GitLab CI, the quirks of drupal.org testing, and the challenges that come with new LLM capabilities.

Moving our code from Github to Drupal and undertaking the upgrade to Drupal 11 capability improved the robustness of our tests but set us some challenges along the way. PHP Unit testing can be a heavy topic so it’s great that Finn pulled all that knowledge together to share with the community and talk about it in this session with his usual fun and light-hearted delivery. 

The "Testing your mettle" session was definitely the most technical one I attended (I may even have wandered into the wrong room!), but I'm glad I stayed,” said Sav. 

“Automated testing is something we have been ramping up at Annertech for some time, so it was really useful to understand how it works and the value it brings. It reinforced how good automated testing can make Quality Assurance more efficient. It gives developers confidence when making changes and ultimately means fewer issues reach clients for their User Acceptance Testing stage.”

Building better forms in LGD: who wants to take this further together? – Alex Sturtivant

Alex’s session on building better forms in LGD was another standout. He spoke about how the Royal London Borough of Greenwich has invested heavily in online forms that align with GDS standards. Greenwich designed new form components and empowered content designers to create accessible, high-quality forms independently. 

“Having experienced first-hand the challenges of legacy systems while working in local government, it was great to see a practical, collaborative approach to improving forms,” said Sav.

“The work not only modernises the experience for residents but also helps teams still relying on outdated processes, while keeping everything simple and accessible for users.”

While South Africa and Mexico were busy making history with a chaotic, three-red-card opening match in the World Cup, the LocalGov Drupal Campers enjoyed a social event at the venue, catching up and meeting new people. Some people even watched the match.

Contribution Day was one of the most rewarding parts of the event for Sav. 

“I've wanted to contribute to LocalGov Drupal for a while, and documentation often ends up being the overlooked part of lots of projects. Our group looked at the information architecture for the new non-technical documentation site, deciding what content should stay, what should change and even starting to build out the new microsite,” he said.

“It was a really varied group, with web teams, content designers and suppliers all bringing different perspectives. I came away wanting to keep contributing to the documentation because it'll become a valuable resource for existing LGD councils, councils considering adopting the platform and suppliers supporting clients on LGD.”

And just to put the cherry on top, Finn succeeded in his endeavour to convince at least one person in the room to start contributing to automated testing. It was a successful day all-round!

Looking ahead 

LocalGov Drupal Camp 2026 proved once again that the real magic of open source is its community. Whether we were huddled over code during the contribution day, debating data models at Sheffield Hallam or sharing pizza over a game of Donkey Kong, the spirit of collaboration is what keeps driving local government digital services forward.

“My biggest highlight was seeing how far LGD has come and the obvious positive impact it's having across local authorities. The collaborative culture that's developed around the project was really clear throughout the event, with councils and suppliers openly sharing ideas and working together to solve common problems,” said Sav.

“It was also great to finally meet people I'd only spoken to online, especially Jayvik from Luton and Sarah and Ross from Solihull. More generally, it was exciting to see how much progress has been made over the last year and get a glimpse of where the project is heading next.”

Team Annertech returned to our respective home offices across Ireland and the UK with plenty of fresh inspiration, a long list of updates to roll out and a renewed excitement for what this community can achieve when we build to share. See you at the next one!