What does Forum One do and how do you work with Drupal?

We help organizations use the web to tackle some the world's most pressing problems - health, education, poverty, and sustainable development, for example. We are a web-development firm, but most of our staff come from policy-oriented backgrounds - with real world NGO, nonprofit, or international development experience. Forum One has been around since 1996 and we have completed over 1,000 projects and launched somewhere around 300 web sites in those 13 years.

We use Drupal as the primary platform for deploying the web sites and applications we build for our clients. It's been great to watch the platform mature so quickly and gain such market share.

How did you first get involved in Drupal development?

Forum One has always been an open source shop, and so even before we were using Drupal on client projects we were watching it closely and evaluating it as it matured. About two years ago we started seeing a real tipping point happening. Organizations working in the public sector started to see the benefits of more collaborative, participatory web sites, and you started seeing really great sites launch that were Drupal-powered. It was about that time that we adopted it as a viable option for our clients. The first project that Forum One launched on Drupal was for Ashoka's Changemakers project - a social entrepreneurship competition site (www.changemakers.net) in 2007, and we've been using Drupal successfully ever since.

What type of websites do you specialize in?

Policy-oriented communications, collaboration, community, and data sharing. Most of the sites we build are about helping our clients' ideas, research, and insights make an impact on a policy issue. And so they need to make it simple for users to easily find and discover those ideas, and engage with it, and each other.

I'd say two good examples are CARMA.org and NextAmerica.csis.org. CARMA.org is first and foremost a map-based visualization and data comparison tool of the carbon emissions of nearly all of the word's power plants (46,000). It is a platform for conversation around the impact of the data through its blog and power-plant community commentary, and it is also a data syndication platform, making all of the data available through an open API.

The Next America site engages young policy professionals and graduate students in a substantive foreign policy debate around key issues like energy, the global economy, human rights, and military and defense. The community that developed around the debates online also convened at a summit in DC, creating a real-world agenda to deliver to our new president based on the collaboration that took place online.

Being DC-based, what advice do you have for other Drupalers coming to the city?

Well, if you haven't been here before you need to pick at least a museum or two to take in. I've got young kids, and so I've spent many weekends at the Natural History Museum's "Bug Zoo" and their new indoor butterfly garden. :-). If insects aren't up your alley, or you're not traveling with a 6-year-old, I'd think most Drupalers would enjoy the Newseum. You can soak in the history of the medium that all of us, as web heads, are re-writing as we speak. Afterwards, I recommend that you kick back
with a cold one at Regional Food and Beverage (known to locals as RFD),which has the area's largest tap list.