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

What Nonprofits Can Learn from Government

Sure, the government can sometimes be bureaucratic and slow moving, but there are some excellent standards that nonprofits can learn from when building a website. Just in the last year, we’ve had the great pleasure to partner with a number of government agencies, and the products that we’ve seen come… Read More

Summer Retrospective: Beaches, Jekyll, Agile, D3 and Innovation

With Labor Day behind us, the temperatures are cooling, the peach crop at the farmer’s market is running thin, and most Forum One folks are back from vacations to beaches, lakes and mountains. Between the summer vacations, we also completed some hot work with our clients: innovative strategies, designs, platform creations, and… Read More