Chapter Three LLC

About Us

Chapter Three was founded in 2006 by Josh Koenig, Matt Cheney, and Zack Rosen, three friends with a shared interest in social change, mutual expertise in open-source technology and grassroots organizing, and a strong belief in the wealth of networks.

Chapter Three Founders

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 head-quarters in Burlington, Vermont as a web-developer and technical volunteer coordinator. He was responsible for servicing the web-technology needs of the state campaign offices, constituency groups, and grassroots web developers.

Afterwards 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.

Josh Koenig

Josh was a co-founder of the DeanSpace project on the Howard Dean presidential campaign. He used that technology when he helped to start-up and run Music for America, a national non-profit promoting progressive politics and participation to the Millennial generation. After the 2004 election cycle and before starting Chapter Three he served as Lead Developer for Trellon LLC, a campaign-oriented Drupal consulting firm. He is also an active contributor to the Drupal open-source community.

Josh has a B.F.A. in Drama from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He's been blogging since 2001 at outlandishjosh.com.

Matt Cheney

Matt had the good fortune to be trained as a librarian, but spends most of his time with computers instead of books. He's served as a political consultant for several campaigns and causes, and developed online information systems to help connect attorneys in the California Death Penalty defense community. Prior to that, he was a researcher at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications where he developed communities for online learning.

Matt Cheney has a B.A. in Philosophy, History, Religious Studies, and Political Science and a M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lead Developer: Robert Wohleb

Robert Wohleb
Robert joined Chapter Three in March 2008. He brings a broad range of development experience to the table, from searching for cancer in medical imaging applications and building the next generation of glucose testing devices, to being a Drupal gun-slinger. Beyond his professional work, he is active in the open-source community, explores the applications of technology in the arts, and continues to experiment with the mysteries of the culinary arts.

Web Developer: Jennifer Lampton

Jennifer Lampton
Jennifer Lea Lampton founded Jeneration.com, her own web design/development company in 1997, the summer after she graduated from High School. She earned a BS in Math/Computer Science from Sweet Briar College and after a few other jobs returned to web in 2003. Working for PagePoint Web Solutions she caught up on all the advancements in web technology. Jen fell in love when she discovered Drupal as an alternative to a hand coded CMS. She shifted the focus of Jeneration to be a drupal-only venture, and steered Pagepoint's clients towards Drupal whenever the project would benefit. She is an active member in the Drupal community. Jen also brings crazy horseback riding skills, and random bits of random and interesting knowledge to the Chapter Three community.

Web Themer: Squiggy Rubio

Squiggy Rubio
Squiggy Rubio joined Chapter Three in May 2008 and brings with her three years experience designing pure CSS based websites for faculty, non-profits and local community organizations. She became obsessed with drupal two years ago, using it whenever she can for web projects and experimenting with it in her spare time. She recently graduated with a degree in Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies at Humboldt State University. A recovering artist and musician, she has been involved with campus and local community organizing and keeping a variety of publics informed about struggles in Chiapas and the US-Mexico Borderlands. She is particularly interested in making open source software available to grassroots projects and is constantly learning new ways to implement web based tools to support and enhance community research projects and situated learning communities.

Web Developer and Systems Admin: Jon Skulski

Jon Skulski
Jon Skulski is armed with a fierce home grown, do-it-yourself ethic which he picked up hacking on open source projects over the past decade. John continues the process of learning by breaking, fixing, and improving code he works on in his personal and professional life. An experienced Drupal engineer with several years of experience, Jon is also interested in exploring the interspaces between the Arts and the Sciences, the interfaces between the Humans and the Machines, and in the inner-places of the old growth Redwood forests.

Project Manager and Quality Assurance: Joshua Lawrence

Joshua joined Chapter Three in March 2008. He hails from Northern California. His Drupal work began about 2 years ago in a small office in Humboldt County. He has a background in customer service that has included roles in project management as well as representing employees for a regional airline. His love for technology has no boundaries much like his ambitions for travel. He has visited over 11 countries in his short life and done community work overseas.

Financials: Dan Finnerty

Dan Finnerty
Daniel came on board in 2007 to help with all things financially related at Chapter Three. As a contractor, he takes care of the books and provides some external perspective and best practices for money and financial management. While he isn't keeping track of financial records, he is busy pressing up vinyl ones under the moniker Spinnerty. Left brain - Right brain in full effect!



Company Philosophy

Chapter Three is anchored in a belief: networks improve the quality of life for human beings all over the world. It's our belief, but we also think it's a fact. Our job is to investigate this fact and build things that work -- work with the network. If that's your goal, we're your guys.

The keys to making this work are ruthless efficiency (openness and competition), integrity, fairness (to a fault), transparency, platforms, and viable ecosystems. We keep the discussion-to-action ratio low, and don't lie or misrepresent ourselves. We're doing our best to walk the talk.

New tools aren't nearly enough. We need to develop an entirely new practice for building and organizing communities of action. There have been many breakthroughs in the past few years. The cultural mainstream has adopted social technology such as blogging and social networks as hungrily as it did radio and television. We've seen radically new and more powerful political campaigns such as Howard Dean's run for president. We've seen the potential for regular people to organize knowledge into a "WikiPedia" which in many ways outperforms the traditional experts-only compellations. Despite all this there is no clear path forward for those pursuing these new forms of organizing.

To get there we will need a full practice: a vocabulary, toolset, instructions, and a compelling narrative made up of real world stories. We are jumpstarting this effort by running what we call an Open Practice: posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others. We will drive the quality and adoption of open social technology, and deepen our understanding and experience of organization and collaboration.