Data Visualization and the 2015 Nation’s Report Card for Reading & Math

This week, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) program published the results of the 2015 Reading and Mathematics assessment for Grades 4 and 8. Through our partnership with Education Testing Services (ETS) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Forum One worked… Read More

Partnerships to Prevent Predatory Lending

Last week, WAMU – our local NPR affiliate – ran a much-needed series on predatory-lending practices in Virginia. In “The Debt Trap,” as the series was dubbed, Reporter Michael Pope specifically focuses on car-title and consumer-finance lenders and the stories of people honestly tricked by an intentionally-deceptive industry. Read More

GSA Hackathons With a Big Return on Investment

Last week, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) hosted a fall 2015 Digital Innovation Hackathon at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was the second time Forum One attended the event where web developers, UX designers, SMEs, data scientists, and project/product managers came together to work with GSA open data in solving… Read More

Social Media – Part 3: Monitoring and Reporting Corruption

“Democracies do a better job at controlling corruption. They are certainly not immune, and corruption scandals become very visible in the presence of free media and other mechanisms of accountability. Authoritarian governments are arguably more dependent on corruption to retain power, but do a better job of sweeping it under… Read More

Good Data Visualization Practice: Small Multiples

I have written recently of our work with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the U.S. Dept. of Education program that provides the most comprehensive picture of students’ academic progress and performance (Forum One works on NAEP as a subcontractor to Educational Testing Services (ETS). Through ongoing review of… Read More

No Dreams or Busywork: Designing Successful Projects

There’s a saying that goes, “ideas without execution are hallucinations.” I’d modify that to say that, ‘ideas without execution are dreams; while in the reverse, execution without an idea is just busywork.’ The reality is that ideas and execution are symbiotic, and a worthwhile project requires both in roughly equal… Read More

Search Snippets with Search API and Display Suite

If you’re using the Display Suite module — and we here at Forum One are big fans — you might have noticed an add-on to pull the search snippet from Apache Solr as a field you could add to a display mode. This means you can use Apache… Read More

Our Fall Semester Assignment: Measuring the Impact of Our Work

Though my last semester of graduate school ended 10 years ago, this time of year always leaves me pining for the promise of a fresh start and the pursuit of knowledge. It could be that I’m still conditioned to follow the educational calendar of my youth, or just that I… Read More

Planning and Building Salesforce Integration in Drupal

While I couldn’t make it to Drupalcon Barcelona last week, I insisted on giving a presentation somewhere. Forum One let me do it as a webinar: Planning and Building Salesforce Integration. There are some truly wonderful tools for integrating Salesforce with Drupal out there, but the tricky part is planning, documenting,… Read More

Gorongosa Park Documentary Series Premiere on PBS

Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique is about to be featured in its very own documentary series on PBS. It is always great to see how our clients use their websites as a platform to further broadcast achievements and special events like this one. As you can see, Gorongosa… Read More