Fen Labalme

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.