This week the Knight Foundation launched its latest Drupal project Knight Pulse. The Knight Foundation works on a broad range of issues related to innovative media work and improving access to information for people and communities. Knight Pulse is a new community site designed to bring everyone involved in the work Knight sponsors together to talk and learn from each other.

Building a new community site can be hard to do. Everyone already has their preferred venues where they go to blog and network, and adding a new one to the mix successfully is a challenge. Rather than trying to build the next Facebook, Kristen Taylor and Marc Fest from Knight’s communications team decided to take an iterative approach and start small with a core feature set, experiment with some ideas, and measure their results and feedback to see what works well. The Knight Foundation loves Drupal, and in this case they’re relying on the modularity and extensibility of Drupal to carry out this process so they can learn as the site grows and expand it later to meet demand and respond to community requests.  (This is why they’re currently calling the Pulse site a “beta” release – it’s going to continue to grow and evolve.)