CivicActions

Owen Barton is a web developer working for non-profits and political campaigns to provide tools for social and environmental change. Owen is currently the technical lead for Shift in Action, a community site for the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Earlier this year, he was the technical lead in the Westly for Governor campaign action site. Owen is an active contributor to the Drupal community. This free & open-source software (Drupal) provides a community platform with modules to help people blog, discuss, plan events, manage contact-networks and share media.

Mirasol Mercado joined CivicActions in April 2007 as the team's Virtual Office Admin, bringing over 15 years administrative experience from the private, public, and small business sectors. Receiving her B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Marketing from CSU East Bay, she has been there, done that and bought the t-shirts to prove it (many of which you may still find her wearing). Her experience spans all levels from administrative analyst and program development, to executive & team support -- and she is always ready to broaden her experience further, most specifically into the exciting world of Drupal to gain better insight into CivicActions’ clients and our cool techs who write code for them.

Mirasol has developed alternative commute programs for a major University which involved grant writing, budget tracking and communications liaison with local transit agencies. In the corporate world of "cube farms" she worked for a leading touch-screen company providing executive support to the R&D team, and in the buying office of a major retailer where she analyzed sales trends which were used as purchase recommendations by the department’s Buyers. Her experience with small businesses involved developing administrative and operations procedures for a small start-up, and assisting a communications design firm specializing in social service agencies. Fortunate to amass such broad administrative knowledge from rock-&-rollers she has worked with and worked for, Mirasol continues to provide administrative expertise and management support to CivicActions’ team of go-getters.

When away from her computer, Mirasol enjoys crafting and trying her hand at organic gardening with her family, or heading to the beach where you can find her participating in beach clean-ups as a Surfrider member or enjoying the beauty of the Pacific Coast as her kids boogie- and skim-board to their hearts’ content.

Joanne Pasila joined CivicActions as a Project Manager and Visual Designer in September 2007. She has worked with us on the Consensus Building Institute, CBuilding.org and with Better World Advertising on MeNotMeth.org. She recently took over project management on the WITNESS Video Hub project and redesigned the ACLU.tv website. Upcoming projects include visual design for Rare Conservation.

Before joining the CivicActions team, Joanne worked as a freelance art director focusing on clients in the fields of culture, education, healthcare as well as non-profits. She consults for a number of LGBTQ organizations in NYC and is an active volunteer with Develop-Don't Destroy Brooklyn and The Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Joanne graduated from the visual arts studio program of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and earned her MFA in the Department of Architecture and Department of Video at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Germany. Her work is shown nationally as well as in Europe, and she is a fellow of the Macdowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. After living in Amsterdam, NL and the woods of Western Mass, she is happy to call Brooklyn home.

Dan Robinson is a co-founder of CivicActions and the Technology Practice Lead. Dan is responsible for the overall technical direction of CivicActions. Dan spends time on all of our client engagements. Typically he will be involved early in the engagement to determine what technologies CivicActions can deliver that meet the clients goals and objectives. In addition to working closely with our clients Dan is also responsible for enhancing our hosting environment, developing our Voter File capability and working with our technology partners to deploy new products and services.

Dan started programming in High School in 1977. He has extensive experience in data center operations, system administration and management, system security, electronic publishing, programming, system's analysis and design, system's architecture, relational database design and programming, design and programming of client-server and distributed systems, fault-tolerant and highly-available systems. Dan has worked with a wide variety of commercial companies including Time-Life, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, Varian, EDS, MCI and Charles Schwab.

Dan also has a long history of community organizing and the promotion of positive social change. In the early 80s he worked to oppose the U.S. wars in Central America and spent time in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He also worked in San Francisco's Mission District assisting political refugees, and raising money and support for community and technology projects in Central America. Recently he has worked closely with the E-Volve Foundation to assist non-profits in realizing the benefits of the Internet.

Henry Poole, Internet Strategist, has three decades experience in information technology, and over ten years with online communities and commerce. Henry was the first technologist to setup a blog for a member of the US House of Representatives. He co-founded CivicActions LLC in the summer of 2004 to provide network-centric Free and Open Source technology solutions for organizations focused on transforming the world.

Henry is currently participating in engagements with Amnesty International, WITNESS, MediaCow.tv, Defective by Design, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Last year, Henry guest lectured at the Stanford School of Journalism on New Media Entrepreneurship.

In early 2003, Henry saw a presentation about Abrupt Climate Change and became concerned that his children may not experience the full breadth of plant and animal life that we now take for granted. Within 30 days, Henry began his work in the political arena when he joined Dennis Kucinich as the Director of Technology for his US Presidential campaign.

Henry began his Internet career in the early 90's co-founding and leading Vivid Studios, where they managed the largest online product introduction in history - The worldwide launch of Windows95 for Microsoft. In just 90 days, Henry assembled a team of experts who deployed servers and software in Europe and the US to manage web and mail for the Internet users who responded to Microsoft's $310 million advertising campaign.

Henry is a member of the Board of the Free Software Foundation. Henry has presented at conferences in Europe and the US, and was the technical editor of Demystifying Multimedia, a seminal work published in 1993.

Aaron S. Pava is a Internet Strategist committed to social empowerment through innovative and pioneering technologies. In 2004, Aaron co-founded CivicActions, now a 35-person professional services firm, which provides Free and Open Source Web technology to non-profit, political and social-change organizations. CivicActions clients include the most notable organizations involved in human rights, social justice and transpersonal growth such as Amnesty International, ACLU, WITNESS Foundation and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Aaron is currently is participating in engagements with Center for Reproductive Rights, Architecture for Humanity, New Voice of Business, Me Not Meth and EcoTuesday.

For over 15 years, Aaron has been coaching and facilitating workshops in transformation - creating extraordinary opportunities for men and women to deepen relationships, accomplish personal goals, and realize their authentic passions. Aaron currently leads workshops for The Six Week and the Arete Center for Excellence, one of the most pioneering workshops in the field of personal growth. He is also the senior editor of Personal Growth Videos and in 2002 Aaron helped establish The Men's Circle, which supports men in discovering and living their life purpose.

Aaron sits on the Boards of the Ocean Beach Foundation and Raise the Frequency, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization which develops programs and services for the advancement of the arts. He has presented at numerous conferences and workshops speaking on the subjects of social activism, personal transformation and living authenticity.

Aaron is a 5th-generation San Francisco resident who lives with his fiancé, Nikki, in their beautiful home in the Excelsior district.

With years of IT industry experience, Robin Barre is a web developer (and linux chick!) with top notch engineering skills. She has been providing services as a PHP developer for the last 7 years. She's developed full web applications including content specific search engines and content management systems.

Besides building web sites, she developed a turn-key application for a Seattle nonprofit to support their main service: social services for the homeless. Helping them move from a legacy system to an in-house web application running on LAMP, it was a great success with even the earliest code releases. Employees had more information at their fingertips, improving communications and overall quality of service.

Robin became an independent contractor in the Seattle area in 2004. Although developing web applications for business was fun, it was not enough. Along comes CivicActions, and it is the best of both worlds: providing technical services and helping to make the world a better place for all. Currently, Robin is working on the WITNESS project called The HUB. Personal interests include learning theory and playing the fiddle (old timey). Political interests focus on free software and equality.

Sam discovered the Internet in 1997 at the age of 14 and hasn't signed off since. After teaching himself the basics of HTML, a chance encounter in a supermarket got him his first job with a web development company. Several years and connections later, he met Jacob Singh and began freelancing for hotel registrars, herbal essence growers, and Calabash Music.

In 2001 he went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to acquire an overpriced degree in Electronic Media, Arts, and Communications. Having learned that making digital multimedia art is (a) really cool and (b) doesn't pay the bills, he went back to web development for a small company in upstate New York after his graduation in 2005.

A year later, Sam realized that cubicles and dressing business-casual was eroding his soul, so he quit his job and returned to the freelance web development world, and has been kicking ass ever since.

Engineer Arthur Foelsche's background is in strategic web application development and deployment for nonprofit and progressive organizations. Arthur is the lead engineer on projects for Jim Hightower and the Hightower Lowdown, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and an active participant in the engineering team for the Institute for Noetic Sciences and Jerry Brown for California Attorney General. Arthur is currently focused on development on the Drupal content management system to improve turnkey solutions for smaller organizations to migrate in-print material to the web.

Before joining the CivicActions team, Arthur cofounded and was the Director of Development at Eggplant Active Media, overseeing a wide variety of PERL and PHP based web application development projects. Arthur was formerly an organizer with the ISE Biotechnology Project where he worked on numerous grassroots campaigns and developed the largest web-based database of material on biotechnology issues at the time. Arthur was also a technical organizer for Indymedia and helped the development of grassroots, web based media outlets in Seattle, Boston, Washington DC, and Prague.

Arthur has a BA from the University of New Hampshire, an MA from Goddard College, and is currently a PhD student in political science at the City University of New York. Arthur is also a founding member of Black Sheep Books, a non-profit radical and scholarly book store.

Gregory Heller is a political technologist working with CivicActions as a project manager and application specialist. A veteran member of the team (starting in June 2005) Gregory became a Member of CivicActions, LLC, in October of 2006. Though Gregory's recent experience is in the world of politics and government, he has also recently worked with CivicActions clients across the spectrum, including managing the Environmental Ethics Network project and project management for our work with Jim Hightower's organizations. He is currently the campaign manager for Defective by Design, a campaign of the Free Software Foundation to increase awareness about the threat DRM poses to personal privacy and security.

Before joining CivicActions, Gregory Heller worked for the Office of the Minority Leader of the New York State Senate. While working for the Democratic Conference he was responsible for strategic technology planning, online communications strategy and data analysis. Gregory also worked with the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee where he performed electoral targeting and online communications strategy as well as grass roots technology strategy. In 2004, Gregory worked on 5 Senate Campaigns, four of which were successful, resulting in a net gain of three seats, the largest in the history of the Senate.

During the 2004 Presidential Campaign, Gregory worked with John Edwards, starting in 2003, and specifically performing voter targeting for the New York City metropolitan area in the run up to the Super Tuesday Presidential Primary. Following Super Tuesday, Gregory worked with Downtown For Democracy, a PAC formed to energize artistic communities around political activism.

Before working with the Senate, Gregory worked for NY ACORN as a technology strategist, database developer and grant writer. Gregory was instrumental in designing the National ACORN Member Database, and a number of voter contact databases used by ACORN and it's allies including New York's Working Families Party.

Gregory is also a veteran of numerous city and state campaigns in New York, including Mayoral, City Council, State Senate, Gubernatorial and City Charter Revision.

Gregory is an active participant in the CivicSpace and AdvoKit user communities and the larger non profit technology community. Gregory is a member of NTEN and the NYC 501 Tech Club.

Gregory holds a Masters degree in Public and Non profit administration from New York University where he also completed his undergraduate degree in Metropolitan Studies and Architecture and Urban Design. He has served for 6 years on the Board of the College Alumni Association and is a member of the Young Alumni Leadership Circle.

Jenn Sramek serves as a project manager at CivicActions, with a deep commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice through education and empowerment. She also has a passion for refined communication and developing processes that make people's lives and work simpler and more connected to their core values.

Since joining the team, she has worked with clients including Storefront Political Media, Leveraging Investments in Creativity, Equilibrium Television, Evolve Strategies, Equal Justice USA, the Archimedes Movement, and BlogHer.

In addition to her work with CivicActions, Jenn has managed web development and ASP tool development projects for small organizations
that cut operating costs and increased constituent involvement. Other
past clients include One Magazine, a cross-platform (web and print)
release incorporated with content management and e-commerce, Logitech,
the United Way of King County, and the Hawai'i Community Foundation.

She has managed major offline projects including the Living Classroom Center for Society, Ecology and Well Being, (a LEED-certified learning center soon to be built in San Francisco), and the testing and implementation of sustainable products and practices for a chain of 42 boutique hotels across the United States. She served as a Sustainable Agriculture volunteer with the Peace Corps in Chad, Central Africa, and helped to incorporate sustainable agriculture techniques into the rural school curriculum in four villages. She is also the author of the SmartSoul Path to Sustainability (a living light curriculum for adults).

Alex has always been interested in making positive change to the world, from involvement in the CND movement, demonstrating against the Gulf war, to reading books on the state of the world such as "Revenge of Gaia" by James Lovelock.

Alex joined CivicActions in September 2006, meeting the team at the DrupalCon conference in Brussels. Alex primarily works on Drupal theming, but also gets his hands dirty with some module development, such as integrating video into the shiftinaction.com web site.

A baptism by fire: Alex worked closely with Arthur on the Flunk Arnold website, where an ambitious YouTube-style website was launched in a very short turnaround. He is proud of the work he has been doing.

Recently his work on the Hightower Download web site involved dynamic integration of flash into Drupal. He has also worked on Solve Climate and Reality Sandwich, and helped out on Witness, and Amnesty.

Ian is our "Resource Advocate" and Scheduler. He also serves on the management team and is responsible for Talent Development (recruiting), resource allocation and process development.

He started his career in interactive work in 1993 working on Time Warner's Orlando-based Interactive TV project. He's been an advisor or consultant to the GRAMMY's, The Emmy's, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures International, Microsoft, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, the Department of Education and has served as Executive Producer for two Omnicom agencies - Razorfish LA and Doremus SF. He innovated webcasting technologies and techniques at Apple Computer and was the Online Director for the first-ever New York Music Festival in the Summer of 95. He is an Eagle Scout, a Master of Ceremonies and a community leader.

In addition to his background as an internet professional services manager, Ian is also a performing singer-songwriter, focused on "Cause-related music" - combining the poignant impact of a purposeful song with the viral reach and engaging interactivity of the web to create music projects that move, touch, serve and inspire.

George Frost is a member of CivicActions and serves as its General Counsel, advising the firm on the full panopoly of legal issues, as well as taking an increasingly active role in client development and strategy.

George worked for more than a decade as a reporter and editor for a variety of "old media" publications, including the San Francisco Examiner, Anchorage Daily News, and Newsweek. Upon obtaining his law degree from the University of California Hastings College of the Law, he joined a San Francisco law firm (later merged with Perkins, Coie), where he specialized in complex litigation, IP and media law. Among the firm's clients were the Hearst Corporation, Gannett, NBC Dateline, as well as various "new media" startups. In 1998, George was named "Rainmaker Associate" by National Jurist's Associates Magazine.

George left Perkins, Coie in 1999 and joined with Spencer Hosie to form the successful boutique law firm Hosie Frost Large & McArthur, where his practice focused on antitrust and other complex business litigation, IP, and media/new media matters. Recent major representative matters include: State of Louisiana v. Chevron U.S.A., a royalty fraud trial on behalf of the State of Louisiana that resulted in a $111 million jury verdict against Chevron, and Burst.com v Microsoft Corp., an antitrust and IP action in which he assisted in obtaining a $60 million settlement with Microsoft. George recently resigned as a partner at the firm and is continuing a solo practice advising statups on IP matters.

George has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco Law School, where he taught media and new media law, and recently served as special counsel to the California Senate Judiciary Committee. He remains active in First Amendment and other issues.

Jacob Singh brings a wealth of engineering and enterprise management experience to his role as a system architect, specializing in open source software, GUI interface design and Object modeling.

He has provided web development services for clients such as The Sony Corporation, The San Francisco Department of Public Health, The California Wildlife Foundation, CalabashMusic.com (the world's first fair trade music store), The Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness, and many others. Because his experience spans commercial, fair trade, corporate and non-profit organizations, he brings unique insight into what will set his clients apart from the rest, and how their image should be tailored to fit their constituency.

His work on a partnership between CalabashMusic.com and National Geographic brought fair trade music from around the world in front of National Geographics audience of tens of millions. As a sales consultant, system architect, project manager and partner liason, he managed six employees in three organizations and successfully launched the high-traffic multimedia rich site on time and under budget.

A former director of the Prison Book Project, he has also held numerous non-profit jobs both in India and the U.S.A.

Bevan Rudge is a themer and web developer with an active role in the drupal developer community. He themed JustCauseIt.com and DemCom, and is also developing the geographic features of the Witness Hub, including integration with Google Maps.

Bevan's work for WITNESS on the Hub Map gives a different perspective on not just the site's content, but also the state of human rights across the globe.

Bevan studies computer science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has a 3-year record of freelance and employed work in web and drupal development. Bevan is very active in the drupal community and contributes heavily to usability, his local drupal user group and even drupal core development occasionally.

Zoey Kroll is an Information Architect, focused on making information and online tools engaging and accessible. At CivicActions she has worked with WITNESS on the Video HUB, Mother Jones and the Media Consortium, Leveraging Investments in Creativity, the Democratic Party of Oregon and the McConnell Foundation.

Prior to CivicActions, Zoey worked with Deloitte Consulting designing websites for clients including MCI, KQED and DIRECTV. She developed the information architecture for Santa Clara County’s award-winning e-Government web portal, which has been praised for its “visionary use of information technology producing and promoting positive social change.”

Since graduating magna cum laude from Yale University, Zoey has spent the past fifteen years working in technology and in the non-profit arts community. When she's not at the computer, she's studying for her sustainable design class at UC Berkeley or growing vegetables in her front yard. Raised on a Northern California community without electricity or telephones, she learned the power of people's relationships to each other and their environment; this has always remained at the forefront of her work in technology.

Amy is a San Francisco based graphic design consultant working to create new and exciting visuals for CivicActions clients. She brings her training in graphic design, a Bachelor's degree in graphic design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY, and over six years of web design experience to the team. She was a founding member of the San Francisco chapter of the League of Pissed Off Voters, and has served as a volunteer organizer and graphic designer for this energetic grassroots group.

She has worked with various national and international human rights and progressive political groups, through independent contracting and as a worker/owner of the Oakland based graphic design collective, Design Action. She is fueled by the satisfaction of doing work that makes a reality of her ideals and the collaboration of others with similar passions.

Amy works in web and print with a variety of organizations sharing the same vision for social change through technology and grassroots efforts that she has found with CivicActions. She specializes in typography, logo design, web graphics, and any other web or print design needs her clients have.

When away from the computer, she paints, crafts, plays the synthesizer and dances.

Most Drupal sites and users have benefited from Doug's software.   He has collaberated, supported, and helped complete projects for most of our clients. He is a well known and respected member of the Drupal Community.  He has contributed over twenty modules, most notably coder and views fastsearch.   He contributed significantly to Drupal 6.x, including the search patch that significantly speeds up all Drupal searches.

Doug bridges the gap between progressive politics and technology. As
well as being a political activist and active participant in party
politics, he innovates software solutions with a two decade long
history using emerging technologies creating tools, language and data management systems, communication, organizational and personal applications.

Doug graduated Cornell University, Engineering and Computer Science, Saint Mary's University, M.B.A. He is a former Air Force Officer, a business entrepreneur, a student of life, husband, dog lover, and skier who currently is happier than ever living on the Florida beaches.

Fen Labalme is a Lead Technology Consultant for CivicActions LLC. He wears many hats in this role, a Stetson one day as he defines technical strategies and culls the appropriate tools and processes to serve a client’s needs and a ball cap the next as he maintains the technical infrastructure that is the backbone for both internal and external projects.

He managed the technical launch of “ShiftInAction,” a revolutionary new web site for the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Again working alongside his team of technologists and interfacing with key political strategists, he is overseeing the VoterFile standardization process for various CivicActions political clients.

His voterfile work has resulted in a template VoterFile format that will allow activists nationwide to more readily and rapidly engage like-minded voters on issues and campaigns. Similarly, his efforts on the new IONS web site helped to create a real-time, dynamic and rich community environment for the organization’s growing web-savvy membership. It is Labalme’s pioneering work on I-names technology, digital identifiers that allow users greater control over their personal information, that will soon be incorporated into CivicActions-created web sites, allowing users an unprecedented level of freedom and privacy. Fen has recently been active in the successfull deployment of CiviMail, a component of CiviCRM.

While at M.I.T., his seminal thesis on knowledge-based, open-access news and information systems (dubbed “NewsPeek”) was the launch pad for personalized media and sparked his later work in the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement while being the catalyst for numerous digital privacy and identity initiatives. Never one to be all work and no play, Labalme founded the M.I.T. Frisbee Golf Club and is still flinging discs, these days with his wife and four-year-old son.

Wim is the author and (co-)maintainer of several Drupal modules and has worked with non-profit, governmental and corporate organizations to build high-profile Drupal-powered sites. Joining CivicActions gave Wim the opportunity to combine his passion for development with his ambition to making the world a better place by contributing his almost decade-long experience and skills to non-profits and organizations that share his values of social responsibility and economic justice.

Wim jumped in head first with the Amnesty International project, pushing functionality to the next level and contributing this effort back to the Drupal community. He modified the CiviCRM installation to include dynamic multi-language support using Drupal's locale module.

A. J. Roach is a database consultant and web engineer for CivicActions LLC. After receiving a degree in Computer Science with a concentration in hyper-text media from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1998, A. J. spent a couple of years working as a database engineer for start-ups in Virginia and Washington, DC, before moving out west to San Francisco to split his time between working as a touring singer-songwriter and a programmer and database designer for Manex and ESC, the visual FX houses responsible for The Matrix trilogy and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In 2003, A. J. decided to make performing his full-time occupation. After performing more than 400 shows in the United States and Europe from 2003 to 2005, AJ joined the CivicActions team in the summer of 2005. He splits his time between changing the world using folk music, and changing it through the use of technology.

Ethan Kiczek is a political technology consultant working with CivicActions as a project manager and application specialist.

Ethan has over 15 years of information technology, project management and application development experience in the educational and financial sectors. His electrical engineering degree and background help him to guide his clients in defining, planning and implementing projects to ensure their on-time and on-budget success. Prior to his work with CivicActions, his clients included Ziff-Davis, Fleet Bank, Tufts University and Harvard University.

He is relatively new to politics and is a founding member of the Inter-University Coalition for a Humane Foreign Policy and AntiWarBoston.org. He is a strong believer that the internet and technology will change the face of politics, and he works with progressive causes and candidates to effect that change.

Ron Akanowicz is an Information Architect and Usability Engineer with more than twelve years of experience. Ron has worked with a number industry-leaders in a variety of roles. As a Senior Business Analyst at FedEx Ron was responsible for drafting functional requirements, creating user interfaces, and conducting usability studies. At Motorola under the title of Usability Engineer Ron created wireframes, performed heuristic evaluations, competitive analysis, and usability testing.

Ron has worked with software applications, websites and, most importantly, people. His experience writing business requirements, creating wire frames, and conducting usability studies are tools for creating a positive user experience, balancing business and user needs, and translating requirements between client and developer.

In addition to his ability to be the voice of the end users, Ron also has a good understanding of technology and the development process. Since joining CivicActions in December Ron has worked on a number of client engagements providing IA deliverables.