Barnsley and Dorset Councils have released the open source code for a new income management system (IMS) developed with support from the Local Digital Fund.
Named Local Gov IMS, it has been developed with the support of digital agency dxw, with the release of the code marking the move into stage two of the project’s beta phase.
The councils have made the source code available on GitHub and called on others to take part in its testing.
Clrl Alan Gardiner of Barnsley Council said: “Our teams quickly discovered a gap in the market for a system like the one they were building. Councils were struggling with the costs and lack of choice in the market and often ended up trapped in long contracts with little alternative.
“The system was initially created for our use at Barnsley, but to make this IMS something that other councils can use, the team decided to build in other functionality to make it open source. That way, we have an IMS created by local government, for local government. We hope this is an approach that others can follow with different services.”
Aim for easy use
Glen Conroy, ICT operations manager at Dorset Council, added: “People only notice an IMS when it’s not working. Either payments get taken, or they don’t, so our aim is to make this as easy to use as possible and ensure it does what it needs to do.
“Local Gov IMS will help the smooth running of processes in any council, ensuring the flow of payments from citizens and around the council is seamless and efficient.”
A number of other local authorities have been involved in the project, the alpha phase of which received £100,000 from the Local Digital Fund, administered by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to support the development of re-usable digital solutions for local government.
