10 years of growth in a community for municipalities

Publify is a municipal development community that began in 2012, intending to establish a common CMS platform that met Danish municipalities' needs for their CMS system. Ten years later, we now have one of Denmark's largest municipal development communities and an ambitious platform that focuses on creating the best framework for the community from an innovative development perspective.

With more participants, there has been an increase in resources in the development community. With increased resources, we have been able to set the pace of new development. Instead of only having a dialogue about new development on online forums and in the meetings where participants can meet physically, we have supplemented physical ERFA meetings with an online session of a few hours duration each month, where the dialogue takes place both in small groups and in plenary.

The increased number of participants also means that we work more broadly in the development community today. The municipalities' need for CMS development is still a fixed part of the plan. Still, if we routinely rely on developing small things within the usual CMS functionality, individual workflows may be easier. Still, we do not add any overall value to the solution or the development community. That is why we today embrace more broadly what is being worked on in Publify.

Through an ongoing dialogue with the municipalities' web administrators, we gain insight into the web administrators' everyday lives. This applies to both challenges with GDPR, where we have developed tools for searching for and deleting personal data on the solutions. It also applies to tasks related to web accessibility, where additional tools incorporated in the CMS system support and guide editors in preparing web accessible content. Most recently, we have worked to create better conditions for sparring and experience sharing between the municipalities, for example, on tasks such as administration of editorial staff.

Publify, the development community, is dynamic by the ongoing dialogue between Kruso and the participating municipalities. The focus for development and the form of facilitation of the development community is continuously adjusted. Which direction we take depends both on the participants' wishes and the dialogue that arises between them and on external factors such as legislation or new technological possibilities.