Agile Collective

The Tutankhamun Spatial Archive has been nominated for an award! The National Archives, UK Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy Congratulations to Daniela Rosenow, Lara Bampfield, @Francisco Bosch-Puche, Elizabeth Fleming, and Jennifer Turner. We're delighted that you are being recognised for your great work. We were honoured to work on the archive, which transforms one of the world’s most important archaeological archives into a sustainable and accessible digital resource. Based on 20,000 excavation records from the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the project replaces an outdated legacy website with a modern, fully searchable database that connects documents, objects, people, and their original locations within the tomb. By preserving fragile documentation and enabling new ways to explore and understand the material, the archive supports research, teaching, and public engagement. It safeguards a unique cultural resource while establishing a new model for presenting complex archival collections in the digital age. Find out more about the award > https://lnkd.in/enWgmvMg

🌍 This morning’s #CoopFortnight shout out goes to our member Agile Collective co‑op – a worker‑owned agency that’s “co‑operating to change the world” by designing, building and supporting websites for mission-driven organisations. 💷 Their world changing activity also includes a Good Causes Fund, through which they give 10% of their profit to causes chosen by their members. A recent recipient was Yalla Cooperative (pictured), a tech co‑op based in Gaza and the UK. The military campaign and humanitarian crisis in Gaza left half the Yalla co‑op team unable to work, while the cost of living surged and basic supplies 🍞 became unaffordable. Yalla’s Joe Friel said: “The Good Causes donation came at one of the hardest points for our co‑operative. The funding went directly toward the monthly financial support we continued to pay our members in Gaza throughout this period. “It meant we could keep standing by our colleagues when they needed it most, rather than letting circumstances beyond their control cut them off. That continuity of support mattered enormously, and we’re genuinely grateful for this contribution that helped us hold the team together.” 🤝 Simon Chapman, Agile Collective co‑op member said, “We felt a keen sense of duty to help fellow co‑operators in the most traumatic of situations. Our contribution was just a drop in the ocean of the support needed to help the people of Gaza who have suffered tremendously over many years.” #Coops #TechForGood #WorkerCoop #MutualAid

‘Changing the world’ is probably not the first phrase people associate with support and maintenance contracts. Support work isn't usually seen as the glamorous side of digital. Nobody has ever fist-pumped after a plugin update went smoothly (well, apart from maybe Daniel Duke). But here’s the thing. A lot of the work that helps organisations change the world and become more resilient, accessible and sustainable happens after launch, not before it. And during Co-op Fortnight, that feels worth talking about. Check out our latest blog for Co-op Fortnight > "How we’re changing the world, one support and maintenance contract at a time" Featuring: Yalla Cooperative, Joe Friel, War on Want, Drupal Association, LocalGov Drupal, Cotech, workers.coop https://lnkd.in/ecYeFXF2 #CoopFortnight Thanks to Jennifer Banks of Co-operatives UK for all her work on Co-ops Fortnight.

How to own our own tech and build better solutions? I spoke alongside Melissa Terras MBE and Shaun Fensom at Co-op Congress on how LocalGov Drupal (LGD), and on tech procurement within co-operatives. Particularly interesting to see the similarities between LGD and Transkribus by read-coop sce: both required up-front investment; both built in user-ownership and open source from the start; and both designed a long-term business model around users pooling resources and staying in control, rather than handing that to a platform vendor. Thanks to Co-op News for the write-up: https://lnkd.in/gerQ5jia

We recently headed to Sheffield for the excellent LocalGov Drupal Camp (which we were delighted to sponsor). In their latest blog, Maria Young and Simon Chapman share their highlights from the event, including: 🥉 Community Fund update Led by Product Lead Will Callaghan, we heard about the epic projects funded by the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund, including: ▫️ LocalGov Elections (updated in time for the recent elections in May)  ▫️ The famous prize-winning PDF importer  ▫️ A brand new module for publishing bus timetables  ▫️ An introduction to Consultations We're inspired to try out some features we hadn’t explored yet and to pitch our own project to the community fund. 🥉 Building better with forms in LocalGov Drupal Alex Sturtivant, Product Lead from Greenwich, kicked off his session by reminding us all of the importance of forms for Local Government. They are often the first point of contact for residents with a council and are used in high-stress situations. It’s vital to get these right. Alex then gave us a tour through the work Greenwich has been doing to deliver an excellent user experience.  He went on to cover the backlog of items Greenwich wants to contribute back to the LocalGov Drupal community, as well as aspirational features they would like to develop in the future. 👉🏽 We worked with our friends at Walsall Council to deliver a similar project, and recently contributed those developments back into LocalGov forms, all ready for Alex (and others) to use. 🥉 From consultations to conversations Our Oxford friends Webcurl Ltd gave us a demo of their new consultations feature. This new LocalGov Drupal module allows councils to publish and manage their public consultations and includes an integration with Mautic Community (an open source equivalent to Mailchimp). We got a demo of the features it already has, and a peek at the roadmap. Very good work! We’ll be demoing this to our council clients. 🥉 Anyone for an open source committee management tool?  This was another brilliant pitch for collaboration from Justine Pocock at Chicken. Democratic Services within councils are required to publish information about their committees, councillors, committee agendas and minutes. The existing solutions have limitations and are not open source. Chicken is building an alpha version with Ryan Falcon-Hay from Hammersmith & Fulham Council, and is seeking co-funding if that's something you are interested in! Read more on our blog > https://lnkd.in/ed34VdBc

Continuing our "Best Agencies by Tech" series, we're taking a look at the highest-performing agencies currently building websites with Drupal Based on Page Speed Insights scores for accessibility, performance and best practices, these agencies are currently leading the way with the highest average scores: Surface Impression, Brighton – average score 92% Agile Collective, Oxford – 90% Hactar, London – 89% Zoocha, Hertford – 87% Mobas Group Cambridge – 85% Drupal has long been the platform of choice for complex, content-rich and enterprise-level websites. However, strong performance, accessibility and best-practice scores are not inherent to the platform itself. They are achieved through the expertise of agencies that prioritise technical excellence and user experience throughout the development. At Web Agency Works, we're on a mission to make website quality more visible. By benchmarking websites across key technical metrics, we're identifying agencies that don't just create attractive websites, but deliver measurable quality under the bonnet too. Congratulations to the teams featured here. If you're a Drupal agency and would like your work featured, submit your projects to Web Agency Works and see how you compare against the UK's best. #Drupal #DigitalAgency #WebDevelopment

🧨 Our next FREE webinar is coming along very soon, and it's going to be a cracker! 🔥 #SEO, #AEO and #GEO - optimising your site for search and for AI. The search landscape is changing quickly with AI overviews and chat search tools. To help product and comms teams navigate this new terrain, we'll be looking at: 🔸 What, if anything, do you need to change for AI discoverability? 🔹 What are the practical steps you should be taking now? Our site analysis guru, Michael Wignall, will cover concepts such as topical authority, trust signals, content sanitation, content design and schema, markdown files and llms.txt, analytics and reporting. Join us > Wednesday 15 July > 13:00 - 13:45 BST Sign up on Luma > https://luma.com/vo2n6njb

This week Simon Chapman and Laurence Sgroi contributed our recent work on #Drupal Webforms back to the community. Thanks, guys! 🙏🏽 In their latest blog, Laurie and Simon tell us all about their mini-sprint to get the work shipped in time for LocalGov Drupal Camp.

We're looking forward to LocalGov Drupal camp later this week and are delighted to be sponsoring again. See you at the social on Wednesday night. Can't wait to see which retro games are on offer at the National Video Game Museum!

📣 We've released stable versions of LocalGov Drupal Microsites for Drupal 11 🥳 Our Tech Lead Finn Lewis would like to say a huge thanks to everyone who's helped along the way. There are too many to remember, but certainly: Tony B. (Annertech), ekes. Mark Conroy (The Confident.com), Lee, Andy Broomfield (Brighton & Hove City Council), Chris Gibson (Newcastle City Council), Alistair Wearring (West Lindsey / North Kesteven), Stephen Cox (Agile Collective), Maria Young (Agile Collective), Adnan (Croydon Council) and many others. 🙏🏽 👉🏽 For dev's This takes the form of new major version releases for the composer scaffold project: https://lnkd.in/ecZuZX4c and the Drupal install profile: https://lnkd.in/edce8XKk Most other dependent modules support both Drupal 10 and Drupal 11. We've added some guidance on upgrading from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 here: https://lnkd.in/eKT8Kmiu If you have LocalGov Drupal Microsites, please do test the upgrade and let us know if you do find any issues. Find out more about our Microsites platform > https://lnkd.in/eEEuNki7