Owen Barton

Owen Barton's dedication to people and love of programming led him to CivicActions in 2006 by way of a small Web shop in Wales, and work with youth in Malawi and New Mexico. His philosophy is one of driving towards simplicity and elegance of design wherever possible, and a real partnership with the client and their constituents throughout development in capturing intended outcomes, engagement with the project process and results. In his role as engineering team leader, Owen also works to connect clients to individual skill sets, a juggling act between the application architects, third party platform interfaces, module developers, themers, flash and javascript programmers who are eager to make a difference.

As a technologist, Owen abstracts the user stories of a system, researches technological solutions, and works with our clients and other team members to architect systems and processes that are achievable with available individual, organizational, technical, and financial resources. Beginning with CivicActions first complex large-scale multimedia application platform in 2005, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), he deployed a local-to-global solution for their “Shift in Action” website that grew their membership exponentially.

Considerable growth was also achieved for Just Cause Magazine, where Owen helped launch a social networking site that puts people at its center thanks to extensive user profile functionality. Where everyone’s a scribe at Just Cause and member content drives the messaging, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) is editorially-driven from the top. It was Owen’s solution to multiple taxonomies that allowed CRR to present complex legal documents in a streamlined and accessible manner, leading to a fully-informed constituency.

In 2010, Owen worked with Google's “Make the Web Faster” project team to make performance improvements in the world's most popular open source CMS.

In addition to client project work, Owen manages the Engineering group at CivicActions, which includes our internal systems. With the distributed nature of many members of our team, Owen has extensive experience with communication tools including Freeswitch, Asterisk and most recently BigBlueButton.