Connected Places was born out of a requirement for The Royal Borough of Kingston Council in 2018. Following an in-depth market review the council decided to commission the co-design and development of their own digital platform to facilitate social prescribing in the borough.
Aligning with the Government Digital Service (GDS) Manual was fundamental to the project. A key tenet of the standard is that new platforms should be made “in the open’' with code being developed under an open source license.
Following a competitive tendering process, Ayup Digital were appointed and subsequently forged a close and collegiate relationship with both the Digital & IT team and the local VCS (Kingston KVA). The project team engaged a wide range of stakeholders during an in-depth discovery phase which was followed by a co-design and agile development phase.
The result of this initial piece of work with Kingston was version 1.0 of the platform. It was released under AGPLv3 license and made available for other local authorities and like-minded organisations to re-use and benefit from Kingston’s investment.
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Our story
Created in 2018, Connected Places is rooted in co-production, open source and user centred design.
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Timeline
A growing community of early adopters benefiting from the open source approach to Connected Places
Commissioned by Kingston Council
Discovery and co-design of MVP
Release of public beta
Co-design and development of new features and functionality
Commissioned by Leeds City Council to re-use code for experimental development of single source of truth for voluntary sector (LOOP)
Commissioned by Healthy London Partnership to deploy and develop an instance for North London, currently named Healthplace.io
Commissioned by Hounslow Council to deploy and localise platform for the Community Solutions team
Commissioned by Sutton Council to deploy and localise platform for Community Solutions
Version 2 of Connected Places, bringing together all features and developments into one single repository
Ready to explore?
Find out how to start using the Connected Places platform, including our wrap-around local installation services.
