Who I am

I am a social activist and a free software advocate. With experience working in a wide variety of roles in many progressive organizations, I understand the world of NGOs, unions, and grassroots groups. With well over ten years experience building web sites, developing interactive online tools, and teaching people how to use the Internet to communicate and educate, I also understand how technology has transformed the ways that progressive groups organize.

What I do

Over the past ten years, I have worked on dozens of projects aimed at helping organizations get their message across online more effectively. I've built dynamic bilingual web sites that the organizations can easily keep up to date on their own, set up thousand-person online mailing lists, built interactive databases to show off policy research in innovative new ways, run online radio stations, set up fundraising campaigns, and built a wide variety of tools for online lobbying. I understand the available technologies and tools, and I can explain your options to you in plain English — or French, and make sure you get what you need and nothing more.

I have no time for the philosophy of "technology for the sake of technology"; instead I can help your group look at what it does well now, and help you see how you can use new technologies to enhance, not change, what's already working. I also have experience in popular education, and can help teach the members of your organization to take full advantage of the tools they already have.

Finally, since no one person can do everything themselves, I work with a number of other graphic designers, writers, and editors who can help in developing the package that you want.

To discuss my availability and rates, please e-mail me.

Featured projects

Canadian Union of Public Employees

In my primary role as web developer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, I am responsible for developing, testing, and supporting the software and hardware behind their award-winning site. Incorporating such features as free web-based e-mail for all CUPE members, online forums and chatrooms, online ordering of union materials, and free hosted and managed web sites for locals, CUPE's site set a new standard for labour web sites when it was relaunched May 1st, 2003. LabourStart gave it their prestigious international labour web site of the year award in 2003 and 2004.

In addition, my work with CUPE includes significant amounts of time spent helping to educate and train our members. I co-wrote our guide to web site hosting for CUPE locals, and have facilitated numerous workshops on web site design.

Carol Wall Campaign

For Carol Wall's bid for the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress, I helped develop a fully bilingual dynamic site that could handle online endorsements of her campaign and accept online donations, and provided a number of tools to help advertise her campaign at a grassroots level.

National Forest Strategy Report Card

To help the Sierra Club of Canada present their research on forest protection in Canada, I developed an online database they can use to store grades for each province on a huge variety of topics related to forest protection, as well as both building direct web-based search tools and an interface to a Flash application to present the results more attractively.

Ottawa Independent Media Centre

As one of the founding members of the Ottawa Independent Media Centre, I helped design and build their first web site and provided hosting for the first two years of its existence. As well, I co-ordinated convergence centres for three major demonstrations in Ottawa, where we provided an alternative media centre used by a wide variety of independent and alternative journalists, including correspondents for CBC, Pacifica, Free Speech Radio News, and CMAQ.

For more information about my involvement in any of these projects, or to find out about other work that I've done, please e-mail me.