August 31 is the early bird deadline for our September 9 Web Executive Seminar, Web Sites Without Walls. You can register using the widget below. After Aug. 31, the price increases.

And anytime between now and the event, if you sign up with two or more of your co-workers, you all will enjoy a special price of only $50/ticket. We also have a limited number of scholarships for students and organizations with small annual budgets.

The session is going to discuss strategies for syndicating web site content and data to increase your organization's reach and impact. It's going to be an extremely informative session. We're going to hear from Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, DC Chief Technical Officer Vivek Kundra, Sunlight Labs Director Clay Johnson, and David Stephenson, the nation's leading "disaster guru techno-geek."

I hope you can make it!

We have a great event on data sharing coming up Sept. 9, and early bird pricing ends on Aug. 31. The event is called "Web Sites Without Walls." You can register at the bottom of this post or read more at www.forumone.com/walls.

In our business (and on this blog), we talk a lot about sharing, syndication, and breaking down walls between "data silos." There are big opportunities for organizations wise enough to expose their data and content beyond their own site. There's also exciting possibilities for taking advantage of feeds from government and other organizations to create your own new web site features.

To give a physical world analogue, it's the difference between printing only a single copy of a report and putting it on a shelf at your organization's headquarters or printing thousands and sending them to every library in the country. In both scenarios, you control the rights to the content and get full credit. But in the latter case, your message's reach is much further and wider.

By not walling off all of your content, and enabling others to re-use your content elsewhere, you are gaining valuable access to audiences you otherwise might not reach. This is the power of syndication.

For years, much of the talk about data syndication was theoretical as we had few good examples to point to. Now, thanks to the popularization of common standards, we have numerous good examples. So we're organizing an event feature some of the leading ones.

Representatives from National Public Radio, the District of Columbia, and the Sunlight Foundation are going to talk about how they got started with syndication, how it's benefiting them, how they convinced management that it was a good idea, and what you can learn from their experiences.

You can learn more about this event and our speakers at www.forumone.com/walls. Or register right here:



Technorati Tags:
nptech
wes08sep

The Alexandria Times, our local neighborhood paper, included a nice mention of Forum One in their August 7-13 issue. The article, High Tech Here at Home, points out that our little neighborhood of Del Ray is home to a number of high tech firms. Del Ray is the area of north of Old Town Alexandria where we've owned our building since 2000.

As per the Alex Times story:

The neighborhood is also home to Forum One Communications, which plans and develops Web sites for nonprofit and public organizations.

The company, with about 35 employees, was founded 12 years ago by graduates of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Forum One quickly attracted a broad base of prestigious clients, including the African Wildlife Foundation, the EPA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, for whom the company develops informative and interesting Web sites.

Andrew Cohen, a project director, said that he is happy the firm operates in Del Ray. "We enjoy the nice mix of residential and businesses on Mount Vernon Ave.," he said. “We feel like we're part of a community here."

He didn't put this in the article, but I also told the reporter that when you visit nearby businesses you frequently meet workers and patrons who know someone on our staff. A number of our staff live right here in the neighborhood and walk to work. It's a good place to live and make one's livelihood.