ThinkShout had the pleasure to partner with American Public Media's Marketplace to design and develop a viral web widget that they can embed on any website to encourage discussions about complex and sensitive sustainability topics. This type of project veers into the Drupal as a development platform territory and, while what types of projects Drupal is a good fit for is far from settled, we felt that at least in this case the benefits far outweighed the costs. Namely, Marketplace benefited from:

• The ease of defining custom content types and fields to use as data structures for the questions and their metadata, E.g., images and descriptions.
• Drupal core's comment module as a backend system for managing responses to questions.
• An ready-to-use administrative interface for managing questions and comments, complete with a role based security model.

ThinkShout filled in the rest of the gaps with custom code for rendering the widgets, generating the embed code, and integrating with Facebook. We're especially proud of the former. Users who wish to engage in a discussion must first login to Facebook and then authorize the BigQuestion. This is all done in a modal dialog using Facebook's javascript API. Once the app is authorized, anyone can post a comment in a discussion and their Facebook profile picture and user id are associated with the comment. The result is ease of use and engagement while maintaining accountability. We've embedded a sample widget and encourage you to take it for a spin.