About the project

In every community, there’s a huge amount of support available to residents, particularly from the voluntary and community sector.

For local authorities, it’s important that residents in need can access this support to improve their situation. It’s also a statutory duty to provide information about services that are available in the local area.

This information is often published in the form of an online directory. In the Royal Borough of Greenwich, we have the Greenwich Community Directory.

Many community directories fail to meet the needs of people that use them: residents, practitioners, council staff, and providers of community services. A lot of information is out of date and the directory itself can be hard to navigate. Maintaining the directory is difficult too, with council staff and service providers using technology which doesn’t meet modern expectations.

At the Royal Borough of Greenwich, we’re designing and building a community directory that better meets our different users’ needs. We want to:

• make it easier for residents and practitioners to find local services
• reduce the effort required to maintain and update the directory
• increase the accuracy and relevancy of information about community services

The problem we’re solving is one we share with many local authorities, so we’ve received funding from the Local Digital Fund to create a product that’s reusable. Our goal is to create an open-source product that can be easily adopted by others at a low cost.

We’ve formed a community of local authorities who meet regularly to support this goal, working together to prioritise the roadmap, share learnings, and solve problems in the directory space.

Our first release

We’ve gone live with the first version of the Greenwich Community Directory.

The first version covers support for adults and replaces the ‘Adults and Older People’ section of the current directory.

It lists over 350 local services available to Greenwich residents, with everything from social and support groups to help for people who want to live independently at home.

The new directory should make it easier for people to find support and activities that are relevant to them. Directory listings are also easier for Royal Borough of Greenwich staff and people who run local services to maintain.

Visit the new directory and share your thoughts and feedback with us.

Learn more about our work

Read our blog post introducing the project and the problems we’re trying to solve.

Visit the Outpost website to see how the product works, read the documentation, and access the code.

Watch our previous show and tells on YouTube

Get involved

If you’d like to chat about the project, be added to our show and tell invites, or receive our weeknotes, then email Melanie (Delivery Manager) Melanie.Wong@royalgreenwich.gov.uk or or Alex (Senior Product Manager) Alex.Sturtivant@royalgreenwich.gov.uk.

We run meet-ups for local authorities using Scout and Outpost, or those interested in using them, every couple of months. They’re very informal and anyone is welcome to join. Alex or Melanie can add you to the invite if you’d like to join the next one.

You can also reach us on LocalGov Digital Slack on the #directories channel