The Elephant in the Room: Your Budget

When I bought my first real car in 2007 (a Honda Civic I lovingly named “Simon”), I remember stepping two feet into the dealership and saying, “hey there. I’m just looking around for a new car.”  The salesman took one look at me and said, “sounds great! What’s your budget?”… Read More

A Global Low-Carbon Footprint: Launching Climatelinks.org

One thing I’ve learned while working on climate change: it doesn’t stay in a box. Any serious discussion about the effects of climate change will inevitably move beyond traditional environmental topics to include everything from agriculture to infrastructure to healthcare. In Washington, a lot of people working on policy issues… Read More

Mapping Content to Audiences – Part 1

Part 1: Setting the Foundation. Sticking to the Point. The pressure to produce and maintain web content is real, and it’s easiest to just write what you know. Unfortunately, this often means organizations just write about themselves (e.g., “Our Company is Turning Seven!”). The reality is that your audiences most… Read More

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