We've started off 2023 strong, with the Reusable Community Directory Show & Tell on the 9th of January and the first community meetup on the 10th.

Reusable Community Directory Show & Tell

In this show and tell we did a recap of the past year and refreshed everyones memories of what we're trying to solve!

I also spoke about Outpost and the Outpost Platform and gave a demo, you can view just the demo video here. (Apologies for the audio quality, my office had no furniture that week, or the next for that matter)

We also talked about our progress on the Greenwich community directory, combining LocalGov Drupal and Outpost.

Outpost (by design) has no content management features built in. So far we've only used Outpost with a static site generator which uses a seamless approach of jumping between two different sites (scout + cms) with the same design. One of our aims is to expand the Outpost Platform offering and provide some tools to help integrate Outpost into other technologies. This work is the first step towards hopefully being able to share a reusable solution or guidance for displaying services in LocalGov Drupal.

We also spoke about our plans for the future, where we're at with our goals and the current roadmap!

We had some excellent feedback and questions, some of which I have incorporated in the documentation. You can view some of the questions on the Frequently asked questions. There were some that were very specific to products so I have added those to some new product faq pages. Scout FAQ and Outpost FAQ.

Outpost Community Meetup

Our first community meetup! 🎉

Topics covered included introductions, and some initial getting to know one another. We spoke about the challenges people are facing and discussed what people would like to get out of the community. We also briefly reviewed the current roadmap that Alex and I put together.

22 September - 5 October

This sprint theme is a continuation of the previous sprint but with more back-end input. We have created the [[Outpost design system]] which corresponds to some of the earlier work from sprint 1 and 2 spikes around the design system and how it could fit in with the approach for creating a reusable Outpost. We now need to discuss this approach and decide if its the one we really want to take.

We are also preparing for our first Show and Tell on the reusable outpost and will be having a session this sprint to prioritise our goals as we merge with the Greenwich product team in the next two weeks.

• We have fixed our Open Referral UK compliancy issues
• Deployed changes around pagination on scout

7 September - 21 September

With our back-end developer on leave, we prioritised the design system. With the help of a product designer from the Royal Borough of Greenwich team we set to work on the design system.

We also created (and populated) this github wiki, not just a place to share these sprintnotes, but as a place to share all documentation, guidance and thinking as we make Outpost easier to reuse.

• We started looking at how to upgrade Outpost to rails 7
• We looked into our Open Referral UK Compliancy
• Began putting together an [[Outpost design system]], using storybook we have a monorepo setup ready to be populated
• Documented all of the current scout components in figma, ready to be standardised with our design tokens approach to the [[Outpost design system]].

17 August - 7 September

This was challenging sprint. We decided to extend the sprint to three weeks to attempt to get a bit more done with a limited team.

• a bug fix and some UI improvements for users marked for deletion in Outpost
• Show the number of search results returned in scout
• The beginnings of some of the Outpost Design System work
• Conversations around the design system and what we will need in relation to whitelabeling, there is a task around the custom 'apps' links that are a feature in Outpost

There were also a couple of key spikes in this sprint to:

• investigate how to consolidate the APIs
• investigate the best way to architect Outpost to allow for easier upgrades

We also reviewed our current support and maintenance model. We determined while there are only a limited number of Outpost/Scout instances that our current model works, but it would need to be revisited when we reach six Outpost instances.

We focused our efforts on understanding migration process that would be required to move an existing directory service to Outpost as this will be useful starting point for any local authority wanting to use Outpost.

4 August 22 - 17 August 22

Sprint one was all about getting things setup and clearing pull requests leftover from other projects. The work included:

• Clearing any outstanding pull requests so we have a good starting point for future work
• Removed hard-coded references to any single instances of Outpost, to prepare for further white-labelling work.
• Merging the latest work we have done into the main branch so we will have the latest features going forwards
• Removed support for preset taxonomies in Scout, meaning we no longer need to rebuild the app every time the taxonomies change in Outpost and taxonomies are now always in sync between Scout and Outpost
• Added a suite of tools to help with data imports when setting up a new instance of Outpost. This included import scripts, documentation and template spreadsheets ready to fill in with the data to import.
• Improved validations to minimise bad data getting into the system via forms and data imports
• Various small bug fixes and security updates