Help us build Quorum — open-source committee management software for councils.
Councils across the UK and beyond are paying a proprietary vendor to manage committees. The software works. The model doesn't. You pay a licence fee every year, to a vendor whose roadmap you can't influence, for data that lives on someone else's servers, behind a portal that doesn't look like your website.
We want to build the alternative.
Why Quorum?
We needed something to call it. Quorum felt right — a quorum is the minimum number of people needed for a meeting to proceed, which is exactly the kind of thing Democratic Services teams think about every day, and it travels well and isn't an acronym!
The name might change as the project develops and more councils get involved. For now, Quorum it is.
What we're proposing
Quorum will be an open-source committee management system, built collaboratively by and for councils. The code will be owned by the community, hosted on council infrastructure, and free to use forever. No licensing fees. No vendor lock-in. No data leaving your servers.
It follows the same model that produced LocalGov Drupal itself — and the Publications Importer, Elections, Subsite Extras, and Event Channels after it. Councils fund the build together, share the asset, and shape the priorities. The more councils involved, the lower the cost to each one.
Hammersmith & Fulham conducted a Preliminary Market Engagement for committee management software in early 2026. We responded with this proposal. The interest from other councils confirms the appetite is real.
Quorum will be built as a standalone platform. It will run on Drupal, but it won't require a council to be using LocalGov Drupal to use it. If you're on a standard Drupal install, Quorum will work for you.
What Quorum will do
Quorum will cover everything a Democratic Services team needs to run committees and public meetings.
For staff:
- Create and manage committees, meetings, and a corporate calendar in a central workspace
- Build and publish agendas with automatic page numbering and itemisation
- Compile meeting packs and make changes without reprinting or redistributing papers
- Role-based access controls for restricted and exempt items
- Reusable templates for consistent agenda and minutes formatting
- Configurable workflows for report submission, review, approval, and publication
- Automatic email distribution of agenda packs to members and attendees
- Attendance recording and in-app voting for live and remote meetings
For members:
- Annotate documents
- Offline access to meeting papers
- Notifications for updates to meetings and committees
For residents:
- A public-facing portal for agendas, minutes, and decisions — using the council's own CSS and navigation, not a bolt-on portal
- Full-text search across committee records, designed to work with partial information
- Online petitions: submit, sign, track, and receive automated updates when thresholds are reached
WCAG 2.2 AA compliance throughout. Accessibility is a baseline, not an afterthought.
AI where it's actually useful
We're careful about AI claims. The LocalGov Drupal community has seen a lot of them.
Here's what we've actually built: the Publications Importer, funded by Southwark Council, uses AI to convert legacy PDFs into structured, accessible HTML. It's in live production on Southwark and Colchester Council websites. It won the Digital Leaders DL100 award in March 2026, and described by senior figures in the Drupal community as the only AI tool with genuine, demonstrable real-world use.
It matters here because agendas, minutes, and decision records are exactly the kind of document-heavy, accessibility-critical content it was built for. Quorum could include this capability from day one.
Beyond that, the genuinely useful AI applications in Quorum are:
- Plain-English summaries of committee decisions for public-facing publication
- Natural language search across agenda and minutes archives
- Draft minutes assistance — helping clerks produce first drafts from meeting notes, for human review and approval
We'll add AI where it solves a real problem. The Publications Importer is our proof that we know the difference.
UK GDPR
Because Quorum will be a self-hosted, council-owned system rather than a third-party SaaS product, UK GDPR compliance is structurally simpler and more robust. All data stays on infrastructure owned and controlled by the council. There is no data-sharing arrangement with a commercial supplier. The council retains full control over data retention, deletion, and subject access requests. Open-source code means the council's DPO and security team can audit exactly how data is handled.
Timescales
A realistic phased approach for a collaborative build of this kind:
Phase 1: Discovery and scoping (months 1–2)
User research with Democratic Services staff across participating councils. Alignment of priorities. Technical architecture. Definition of the MVP feature set.
Phase 2: Core build (months 3–8)
Committee and meeting management, agenda and minutes workflow, document pack compilation, role-based access controls, public-facing portal. Iterative delivery with regular reviews.
Phase 3: Extended features, onboarding, and data migration (months 9–12)
Petitions, voting, staff onboarding, and documentation.
Data migration is considered from day one, not bolted on at the end. Quorum will be built with migration in mind — with clear data structures, open formats, and tooling that makes it possible for councils to migrate their own records, or work with a supplier to do so. The approach won't be the same for every council; how far back you need to go and what format your existing system uses will shape what migration looks like for you. But you won't be starting from scratch or hitting a wall.
Ongoing: Community maintenance
Post-launch, Quorum is maintained as an open-source community project. Future features funded collaboratively by participating councils according to shared priorities.
Cost
The collaborative model is central to how the cost works.
A single council funding Quorum alone is around £80,000 (very finger in the air estimate). Two or three councils co-funding brings that down significantly. Five or more makes it genuinely competitive with annual SaaS licensing costs — and at the end of it, every council owns the asset outright, with no ongoing licence fee.
Typical proprietary committee management software costs £15,000–£40,000 per year, every year, with nothing to show for it at contract end.
Data migration is considered from day one, not bolted on at the end. Quorum will be built with migration in mind — with clear data structures, open formats, and tooling that makes it possible for councils to migrate their own records, or work with a supplier to do so. Costs will vary depending on how far back you need to go and what format your existing system uses, but you won't be starting from scratch or hitting a wall.
Who's leading this
Our track record in the community fund:
- Publications Importer — funded by Southwark, in live use, DL100 winner.
- Subsite Extras — funded by Essex County Council, brought H&F functionality to the whole community
- Event Channels — funded by Essex and Brighton & Hove, already in production
We're registered suppliers on G-Cloud 14 and DOS7, so any council wanting to proceed has a compliant route.
Get involved
We're not asking for a budget commitment, yet. We're looking for councils to express interest so we can understand the level of support and scope this properly together.
If you'd like to back Quorum or find out more, contact Will or us.