Government as a PRODUCT - Apps for America

Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, and director of engagement for Expert Labs. He was the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011.

Johnson’s combination of experience as a developer, working in politics, entrepreneurism, and non-profit work gives him a unique perspective on media and culture. His life is dedicated to giving people greater access to the truth about what’s going on in their communities, their cities and their governments. He still claims that he learned all he needs to know from a two year tour as the late-shift waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, GA.

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Michael Knapp, Ph.D. founded GreenRiver.org in 2000, and is a co-owner and the Managing Director. He specializes in web-based application development, and has managed the development of dozens of environmental, educational, and public health applications. Prior to founding GreenRiver,org, Michael was Director of Product Development at EdsUp, a web application development and consulting company specializing in the development of online educational environments. Michael was trained as an applied biostatistician, conducting statistical analyses and working with spatial data. Michael received his Ph.D. in Environmental Health Management from Yale University in 1998. His dissertation involved the integration and analysis of spatial and relational data.

Joe has over 10 years experience leading web projects focused on communications strategy, knowledge management, and online community building. He has consulted for a wide range of clients including the federal government, nonprofit organizations, foundations, industry associations, and the private sector and has work experience in 10 countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

He holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Washington and Lee University and an M.S. from the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina.

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Jeremy is the lead developer of DocumentCloud, an open-source repository of documents contributed by journalists and non-profits. DocumentCloud was a winner of the 2009 Knight News Challenge. He works on the Ruby-Processing project for software art, placed in two Apps for America competitions, and lives and works in New York City.

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Dave Augustine is a web/multimedia developer at WestEd, a non-profit educational research organization. Dave is passionate about technology and the web, and strives to be on the forefront of the web development world. A coder with a love of the more visual side of things, he mostly concerns himself with the areas of usability, accessibility, clean code and design. He is one of three developers of govpulse, an Apps for America 2 finalist.

Prior to joining WestEd, Dave was employed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a multimedia consultant in the Digital Media Center, teaching professors, faculty, and staff how to integrate multimedia into their classrooms; he was also a technology consultant for the Center for Biology Education. Dave received a Bachelor of Science degree in History of Science with an emphasis on Computer Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison.