Our history
Development Seed began in the mountains of Peru, deploying open source communication portals for international development organizations working to rebuild after two decades of internal conflict. Our first partners were small grassroots organizations working to improve the economic infrastructure in the region and provide basic healthcare services. While the reach of our clients and the complexity of our projects has changed over the years, the underlying mission of Development Seed has not: to provide forward thinking technology solutions to world-changing organizations.
Practical communications strategy
Since our start we have worked for organizations that need help solving concrete problems on the ground, and both our work for clients and our product development focus continue today with this very practical perspective. We start conversations focusing on "commander's intent," with discussions about users – who they are, where they work, what they need to do. Real world needs guide our strategy and development processes. At Development Seed, we innovate to transform those needs and create lasting change and new levels of effectiveness for our clients.
Working with open source
From the beginning we have been committed to using open source software as our development base. To develop mission-critical tools for our partners, we need the security, power, flexibility and sustainability that only open source software can provide. In particular, we have specialized in developing websites and applications with Drupal, rendering maps with Mapnik, scaling databases with MySQL and PostGIS, managing shape files with QGIS, and visualizing data with a variety of open source graphing libraries. Our technology toolset is always growing and changing to meet our evolving needs, and our full time R&D team consistently contributes to these projects to push the limits of the possible and strengthen the wider open source community.
Drupal
We first chose to build with Drupal because it is powerful, stable, and has a large and active community supporting it. Seven years later, we still choose Drupal for all the same reasons. Over that time, we have become core Drupal contributors and lead the development of many key modules that have helped make Drupal one of the most popular and useful development platforms in the world. We are also committed to sustaining the Drupal community, and contribute in a range of ways, from hosting the spring 2009 DrupalCon in Washington, DC to trainings and other capacity building for Drupal developers. Drupal is not the only open source tool in our toolbox, but it is one we return to repeatedly to help us meet many core needs.