Sam Lerner

Sam Lerner works best when he’s surrounded by visuals, graphics and music and his best work involves putting technology right in the middle of it. A creative engineer and Flash expert at CivicActions, he thrives on clients seeking community-oriented solutions. While at Calabash Music, the first fair-trade online music company, he created a built-in media player that helped put more money in musicians’ pockets. This marriage of music to technology dates to Sam’s days at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where his thesis project was “The Synaestheater,” or software that makes music visual – think “Fantasia” brought to 21st century life. Sam couldn’t help but smile during his first project for CivicActions, dubbed “The Great Turtle Race.” An initiative for Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP), the web site chronicled the migration of tagged leatherback turtles from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. Corporations and celebrities such as Stephen Colbert quickly jumped in to sponsor a turtle and the “race” was showcased via Sam’s time-lapse Flash animation map, updated daily. The project raised huge awareness for the turtles and drove significant traffic back to the organizer’s web site, also developed by CivicActions. Working with Amnesty International on their state-of-the-art web site, Sam’s team was tasked with finding a lightweight solution for searching the organization’s exhaustive document database. By incorporating Google Mini, the site and its attendant document library can now be searched seamlessly. As the firm’s resident humorist, Sam can find the silver lining in most any situation online or off. When not working online (which he’s been doing since age 14), he enjoys playing improvisational piano and working on community-oriented agriculture programs near his home in Rhode Island.