What is PBS Engage?

PBS Engage is an initiative funded by the Knight Foundation to help PBS, member stations and producers connect with their audiences online using social media tools. The Engage Web site – built with Drupal – is a place for experimentation with these tools, like live online chats with PBS people and personalities, and to show PBS.org visitors where they can go to find conversations to join.

What led you to start working with Drupal?

As public media, we wanted to make a commitment to the open source community, and the Knight Foundation is particularly interested in using Drupal. Drupal has been a fantastic way to get up and running quickly as a social media site. The Engage site was originally created in late 2007, and we’ve been adding functionality almost continuously since then – not many content management systems allow you to dream up new ideas and implement them so efficiently.

The Drupal community is a great asset as well. Often the things we want to include on our site are already built, and if they’re not, we’re able to expand upon and improve the existing code – all the while contributing back to the community. In our minds, that makes the Engage site true "public media." The work of the Drupal community helps us, and we’re in turn able to help and inspire others.

As you've worked to bring PBS into the age of social media, how has Drupal helped most?

The solid foundation of the Drupal core, coupled with the countless hours of developers building and enhancing the many contributed modules that the Engage site uses (including Panels, FeedAPI, Gmap, Mollom, and many more) enable us to get up and running, then iterate quickly to try new things in a rapidly changing media environment. Drupal's diverse modules and flexibility enhances our efforts to give the public the ability to share and connect with PBS in ways that non-free and open-source software can’t.

What are you looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

When we learned at the Washington DC Drupal meetup several months ago that DrupalCon was coming, we immediately knew that we had to get involved. It has been very exciting to see the progress being made by the tremendous people planning and organizing the conference and we’re excited to be a part of it.

We are always looking for new ways to connect and engage audiences online. We're very excited to see some of the new sites and projects being built with Drupal to get ideas and inspiration for Engage. One area that we’re especially interested in right now is finding ways that video can be used for online conversations, and still make it easy enough for the masses to enjoy and participate.