CivicActions

Simply put, an artistic sensibility is in Alex Scott’s blood. The unassuming Brit is the grandson of renowned painter William Scott and the son of Academy-Award-winning filmmaker James Scott. Armed with a degree in the visual and performing arts, Alex progressed from traditional arts into the technical realm and has found the role of themer/engineer/tech lead at CivicActions to be the perfect blend of his many passions. Proving himself at British Telecom, he went on to design web sites for a London Animation Festival and the London Aquarium, the latter his first foray into Drupal programming. Meeting up with CivicActions at a Brussels DrupalCon extended his presence in the Drupal community.

Imbuing a site with a strong visual sense is Alex’s main objective and he marries that to intuitive navigation. On Reality Sandwich, a blog space for alternative creative writers and performers, Alex translated the client’s desire to connect the user to their content via a visual prompt into a series of spinning, ever-changing images that take you directly to the artist’s work. With SolveClimate.com, a site that informs on, and advocates for, effective environmental and climatological solutions, Alex took the work of an external graphic designer and translated it to visual terms, crafting a user experience that draws people in both logically and emotionally. In much the same way, he worked on the multimedia-heavy Flunk Arnold web site to give it an effortless visual clarity.

Having survived a vegetarian boarding school, Alex’s life today is gravy and further enhanced by the cuisine of his newfound homeland, Madrid. He campaigns for unilateral nuclear disarmament and revels in the many ways he can effect positive change by being a part of CivicActions.

Arthur Foelsche believes you can’t change the world without knowing about the world – and communicating what you know to others. A technology lead and partner at CivicActions, he has moved seamlessly from activist to advocate for more than a decade and was key to IndyMedia’s efforts during the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. Using technology to help what’s local go global, he has empowered citizen activists in the anti-GMO movement and was an organizer of the ISE Biotechnology Project, developing one of the largest online databases on biotechnology issues at the time.

As the author of the Drupal-based Media Mover module, Arthur leveled the playing field and made it possible for open-source-driven non-profits to compete with the You Tubes of the world. His module created a trans-coding engine that allows for the use of rich media in a highly flexible way. This technology was put to good use on the Witness Project, which relies heavily on audio and video to document human rights abuses. On the Flunk Arnold campaign, the Teachers Union of California gave Arthur and his team two weeks to build a site that helped students post their own videos opposing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to rip their schools apart. It worked, due in large part to Arthur’s took kit and the client’s trust in his ability to deploy these technologies effectively.

With his bike as his touchstone, Arthur is quick to get away from his computer screen and out for long rides in the far reaches of Vermont. Quieter moments are spent at Black Sheep Books, a non-ideological space where, as a founding member, he has shepherded a selection that covers philosophy, political science and anthropology and provides the intellectual infrastructure necessary to think about the world.

While Doug Green is a tech lead and partner at CivicActions, he could just as easily be called “head geek.” With a computer science degree from the College of Engineering at Cornell, Doug has over 20 years of programming experience and has morphed from C++ and Unix junkie to PHP and Drupal guru. As a core contributor to Drupal, he has given numerous patches and over twenty modules back to the coding community and contributed heavily to the Drupal 6 release. His two most significant contributions are a search engine module used by thousands of developers and a code review module which is now a standard part of a coder's tool kit.

With an eye toward maximizing a client's efficiency and expanding their reach, it is Doug's technical wizardry that serves to propel the causes they represent. On behalf of a legislative client, he created the U.S. Congress module, which gathers legislative data (such as that in H.R. Bills) that can be used in a variety of ways. Working for Rare Conservation, a 30-year-old environmental organization with global campaigns, Doug's campaign management system, a custom application that streamlines work flow and generates a sophisticated scoring system for each campaign, allows the organization to analyze and quantify its far-reaching efforts.

Doug's political metamorphosis has its roots in Texas, where the onetime registered Republican switched parties and became a key supporter of John Kerry in 2004. Building DallasForKerry.com, the tech-driven initiative rallied over 3,000 volunteers, one of the largest in Texas at that time. Having landed in one of the most conservative counties in Florida, Doug believes his political energies are now better spent on behalf of CivicActions' clients.

What can you say about a man who turned down a job offer from George Lucas when the director came a-calling at MIT? It's obvious that Fen Labalme wanted to save the world at an early age, which is why he resides far from Hollywood as quality assurance and digital identity guru at CivicActions, where he is also a partner. While at MIT, 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, paving the way for numerous digital privacy and identity initiatives.

Crafting simple yet elegant tools comes easily to Fen, all the more so when he's passionate about the work. His mechanism for standardizing Voter File data has proved huge for clients in the political arena, with cleaner data allowing for better targeting of constituents according to views, demographics or past voting history. Working on the CiviMail component of CiviCRM, Fen created a facile interface for managing the back channels of these opt-in mailings, a tool which has been used in hundreds of deployments around the world including those on behalf of Amnesty International, the WITNESS Project and the Women's Funding Network.

An activist of long standing, Fen firmly believes that it's the grass roots who will change the world. If Al Gore invented the Internet, it can be said Fen Labalme invented the Media Lab, since it was his thesis at MIT that generated the seed funding for the sandbox of the digerati. He is a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and also helped start the California Peace Action Network, an early proponent of Stop First-Strike initiatives.

Gregory Heller is seemingly everywhere at once. A frequent (and carbon-neutral) flyer, technology strategist and partner at CivicActions, he combines his knack for social and professional networking and deep understanding of how non-profits work in deploying complex technologies for the company's clients. The accidental techie came to CivicActions after retaining the firm on behalf of the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. He is a relentless evangelist for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools including Drupal and CiviCRM as well as social media magnets including Facebook and Twitter.

Navigating the firm's clients through a burgeoning social media ecosystem, Gregory paves the way for critical thinking that leads to results-oriented engagements. Working on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, he employed a variety of strategies that spelled out the “Defective By Design” meme: Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology is not acceptable. As the campaign gained momentum, the mainstream media jumped on board, prompting iTunes to acknowledge that DRM doesn't work and compelling major record companies to give up on it. Gregory's activism can be traced to his days at NYU, where he led the charge against PepsiCo's dealings with an oppressive regime in Burma. Here again, a sticky meme (“You Can't Buy Freedom With Pepsi Points”) and an assist from the media led the conglomerate to divest its Burmese holdings.

With an eye on the triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profits), Gregory is a champion of the environment, sustainability, human rights and social justice. He organizes the Seattle Drupal User Group and numerous DrupalCamps, is an EcoTuesday Ambassador and participates in Saturday House, an ad-hoc get-together of geeks and thinkers.

It’s all about forward motion for Ian Rhett. As self-styled talent manager and resource advocate at CivicActions, his role is two-fold: find the best people and put them in the right place at the right time. He honed his skills at Razorfish L.A., where he grew the cutting-edge web developer from thirteen to eighty employees within a year. Stints with Hollywood and multi-media firms followed, each informing his ability to assess talent and facilitating his ease with both artists and engineers. A desire for ethical abundance brought him to CivicActions, where he is now a partner.

It is by virtue of the firm’s extensive networks that Ian gains access to great talent. Community-building events such as Drupalcon and Drupal User Groups speak to the firm’s strength and how it chooses to do business. Once new hires are on-boarded, they are quickly integrated via a sophisticated resource matrix that addresses short- and long-term client needs; capacity planning schedules drill down further and see to it that every project is properly staffed. A natural extension of this work has Ian at the helm of the firm’s Strategy group, where he and his team shepherd the firm’s clients toward a comprehensive Internet strategy.

Being ahead of the curve has long fascinated Ian, especially as it relates to viral trajectories on the Internet. As a cause-driven musician, he is keen to understand how his music plays online. In an utterly grass-roots venture, he launched GenerateKindness.org to see how many like-named stickers he could get into circulation. The fact that he has nearly 100,000 yet-to-be-filled sticker requests speaks volumes on the Internet’s ability to focus human attention and compel people to take action.

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 has managed the WITNESS video hub project since January 2008. Projects to which she contributed visual design include the ACLU.tv website and 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.

Justine Hirsch joined CivicActions as a Project Manager in May 2007. She has over twenty years of Operations and Project Management experience in a variety of industry settings, including construction and health care, working with a broad spectrum of clients and projects.

Justine spent six years working in the National Health Service in the UK, managing a training scheme for doctors wishing to specialize in Psychiatry, covering eight hospitals and 52 individual doctor posts in the London area. She developed and edited a quarterly newsletter for resident doctors about the scheme, available opportunities and articles on recent research projects

Justine has a keen interest in open source digital identity management and was the Project Manager for the inames (a universal private address for people's electronic communications) Global Launch program, working with XDI.org and their sub-contractors and clients to implement and launch a registry for iname registration and management. Justine's work with CivicActions has included projects with the Congress for New Urbanism, Association of Direct Democrats, Just Cause, Rare Conservation, FoleshillFields Vision Project, Stanford University and Berkeley School of Journalism web sites and Drupal modules.

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.

Giving back is the way forward in Nedjo Rogers’ world. As one of the most prolific developers in the Drupal community, he has authored dozens of modules and contributed significantly to Drupal core. As an engineer and tech lead at CivicActions, he is at his best when he is able to work to the highest standards in obtaining the right solution for a client. Open-source software facilitates these solutions, since it can answer a problem generically and pave the way for clients and community developers to extend or augment same. Nedjo has over twenty years of experience in the non-profit sector and two years at CivicSpace Labs, which employed Drupal in its political organizing platform.

Experience in the areas of internationalization and multilingual support is part of what attracted Nedjo to CivicActions, since many of the firm’s clients (Amnesty International, Rare Conservation) have web sites in a multiplicity of languages. Working with Sony Music, which utilized one code base for myriad sites in heavy rotation, Nedjo coordinated a project to upgrade their platform to Drupal 6 and enhance multilingual support in major contributed modules. The engagement was enhanced by Sony’s directive to contribute all new code back to Drupal. Similarly, on the Witness Video Hub, Nedjo improved and refactored an extensive code base, removing patches and reducing the amount of custom code. The result was better performance and a smaller, more robust code base ready to work seamlessly with the latest Drupal version.

With a Masters in Geography, Nedjo’s world view is evident at work and home. The resident of Victoria, B.C. is currently with his family on a half-year adventure to Nicaragua, where he is continuing his support of community and political movements throughout Central America in fluent Spanish.

Learning and teaching have long fascinated Robin Barre, but it’s communicating that fills her days as tech lead and engineer at CivicActions. With each project, she assembles a cohesive team and gives them the space – and guidance – to create technical solutions that adhere to best practices and meet client requirements. An experienced Drupal coder who has contributed patches and modules back to the community, Robin has long worked with non- and for-profit clients as well as government entities. At the local government level, she has created web sites for communities, a homeless outreach center and several animal care and control groups.

Keeping the lines of communication open is what allows Robin to continually deliver web sites that meet customer needs. With OpenToSolutions.org, an initiative funded by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism to raise awareness of violence in a local community, she kept her team small and checked in regularly to insure that everyone was on track. The resulting site is a lean platform supporting multi-media content generated by the School’s grad students. Working with Architecture for Humanity, Robin was entrusted with a major back-end upgrade to an existing Drupal site. Honing in on what was most important to the client, she and her team delivered a site that the client can easily extend themselves ahead of future upgrades to functionality.

An explorer of music and form, Robin spends off-line time playing violin, drums and dancing. Her fascination with group dynamics and the concepts of learning theory – specifically applied behavioral science and positive reinforcement – keeps her inspired and continually in search of human interaction.

Sadie enjoys rallying a group of people to share a vision and then working with them to make the vision a reality. She has a strong background in all aspects of Web development, including many years of working as a hands-on Web engineer and systems administrator. She prides herself on being a communication link between technical and non-technical participants on a team.

Before working with CivicActions Sadie managed the Web Services at the UCSF Health Sciences Library and managed Web Engineering at YesVideo, Inc. As a consultant her clients have included Gap Online, Intuit, Catholic Healthcare West, Reel.com, and Organic, Inc.

Sadie holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from UCLA. She is learning to play bluegrass mandolin and enjoys reading really big thick books with lots of characters.

Stella Power joined the CivicActions team in 2008 as an Engineer working on a project funded by Sony to improve Drupal's internationalization features. She is the author and maintainer of several Drupal projects, including the popular Lightbox2 and FAQ modules.

Previously, Stella worked as a senior systems developer and assistant development manager in financial transactions services companies. She has worked on a number of different projects, from billing systems to gift card solutions, and was lead developer on Europe's first Virtual VISA Voucher system.

Stella graduated with a Computational Physics degree from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and is currently studying for a Masters degree in Software Engineering in Dublin City University. When not working or studying, Stella can be found in the ceramics studio or pursuing her passion for amateur photography.