Project team

The Center for Citizen Media created this project for the Knight Citizen News Network. Team members included:

Laura Lo Forti

An expatriate from Italy, Laura is a storyteller and multimedia producer based in New York City. Laura served as an intern and multimedia producer on this project.

Matthew Lee

Matthew comes from a background in Information Technology and non-profit work. A San Francisco native, he is a graduate of UCLA (class of 2006) and is currently studying in Washington, DC, at Georgetown University. Matt worked as an intern on this project.

Hop Studios

Hop Studios is Susannah Gardner, Travis Smith and Matt Gardner. They have been doing Internet design, development and consulting for five years. Hop Studios brings an insightful concern for community building and editorial workflow to bear on each project, backed by solid design and interface interaction skills. Hop builds many types of sites, but it specializes in those with copious, rapidly changing content or with a strong journalism, education or editorial component.

Deborah Block-Schwenk

Deborah Block-Schwenk graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in biology and English from Brandeis University.  Stumbling into a career in software quality assurance cemented her love of technology.  Discovering the power of blogs to influence debate and give power to individual voices persuaded her that new media technologies could help change the world.  She is currently a full-time student, pursuing an M.A. in media studies at the New School in New York.

J.D. Lasica

J.D. Lasica is a strategist, journalist, writer and new media executive. He is president of the Social Media Consulting Group and co-founder of Ourmedia, a free community site and learning center for user-created video and audio. His book Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation explores the emerging media landscape. He writes about citizen media and social networks at Socialmedia.biz. In a previous life, J.D. was an editor at the Sacramento Bee and editorial manager of several Silicon Valley startups. J.D. served as project coordinator for the Principles of Citizen Journalism effort.

Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Dan is author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens’ media and why it matters.

Jay Campbell

Jay Campbell is director of Santa Cruz Tech, the technology incubator responsible for Blogshares, QuackTrack, FeedBeep, von Kempelen, The Agonist and a variety of client projects like Chris Pirillo’s LockerGnome. Jay has been assisting Dan since the days of Bayosphere and continues to develop for citizen media organizations such as the Center for Investigative Reporting and J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism.

Rob Beckett

Rob is lead programmer for Santa Cruz Tech and does the heavy lifting for Jay on web community projects, massive database optimization, APIs, workflow and other headache-inducing technology.

Zack Rosen

Zack started the DeanSpace project in 2003 during his summer break from the University of Illinois. He then left school to take a job at the Howard Dean presidential campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vt., as a web developer and technical volunteer coordinator.  Next he co-founded and directed the CivicSpace project for two years. He is an active business leader in the Drupal open-source community and has freely contributed his expertise to hundreds of grassroots web projects.