Family Context is a tool that allows social workers to easily access service involvement information on relevant individuals in order to then facilitate conversations with lead practitioners.
We want to ensure that social workers always have the information they need so that:
- More young people are well looked after by their families and fewer end up in care
- Children are protected from harm even when no single service perceives significant risk
- Social workers are viewed by all families as people who really understand their circumstances and can support them
This project is a partnership between Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Leeds City Council, Social Finance and MHCLG’s Local Digital Collaboration Unit.
The project is funded by MHCLG’s Local Digital Fund and the Christie Foundation – both funders are focused on supporting local authorities to create common solutions to shared problems.
The project supports working in the open, and the project status can be followed on the Local Gov Digital Pipeline Tool. Outputs from Discovery and Alpha are available on GitHub.
The purpose of this repository is to co-develop the service API for the tool in the open so that all participants can have an early input into the design. This includes both project partners, and other interested parties. Contributions are welcome. Please contact kws for more details until we complete contributor information.
An up-to-date build of the application is maintained on Heroku: https://family-context-api.herokuapp.com - the application mimics the authentication flow, but no password is required to log in. Any string instead of an email will be accepted. The deploy also includes an interactive API explorer https://family-context-api.herokuapp.com/ui/
An Excel export of the API Schema objects cant be found in https://family-context-api.herokuapp.com/family-context-api.xlsx
The data comes from the static data provided in ./server/data/*.csv.
A slightly out-of-date Message Sequence Chart of the application flow:
The Family Context project aims to support multiple local authorities, with different requirements around infrastructure, datasources and reporting tools. The reference application provides a baseline set of functionality that children's services departments can either build-upon or use as an input into their own development process.
The API is designed to follow the recommended user journeys identified in the earlier phases of the project, and implement sensible data and security boundaries.
The Family Context API is documented using Open API with a reference implementation generated using Swagger Codegen combined with a basic Flask application. A React sample UI is also provided for reference although this does not attempt to match the recommended styles, but only to reproduce the key flows and illustrate API usage.
The reference version for this schema is available in schema/family-context-api.yaml.
After making changes to this file, it is important to re-generate the server and client stubs.
We use Swagger Codegen to implement Python and JavaScript versions of the API. The simplest way to do
this is to use the dockerised version of Swagger Codegen. Make sure you have Swagger running, then
run make clean followed by make.
Alternatively, you can run the docker commands in the Makefile individually. For example, you can re-generate the server by running
server/swagger_server/swagger/swagger.yaml: schema/family-context-api.yaml
rm -rf build/python
docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/local swaggerapi/swagger-codegen-cli-v3:3.0.15 generate \
-i /local/schema/family-context-api.yaml \
-l python-flask \
-o /local/build/python/
rsync -avP --delete build/python/swagger_server server/.
The simplest way to build and run the entire application is using Docker. Simply run
$ docker build . -t family-context-api
$ docker run -it -p8080:8080 family-context-api
You can then access the API specification on
and the reference UI on
Our reference application is deployed on Heroku to https://family-context-api.herokuapp.com
To run your own version of this, make sure you configure Heroku to deploy Docker images.
heroku apps:create <appname>
heroku git:remote --app <appname>
heroku stack:set container
git push heroku master