Like clockwork

Eric co-founded Development Seed more than four years ago and continues to lead our innovative communications strategy. One of Eric’s talents is seeing the big picture. This, combined with his ability to spot trends and shifts before practically everyone else, helps him come up with many of our brilliant ideas. His leadership and motivation skills turn many of these ideas into real communication tools that enable our clients to do more.

Eric is a strong communicator that knows how to ask the right questions to get the root of our clients’ needs. He works closely with our clients in the start of projects to understand their goals and craft innovative and effective approaches that will meet them.

Eric is a specialist in knowledge management and has presented his strategies and several of the tools we’ve built at conferences around the world. He's also involved with the MobileActive community, particularly with sms campaigns and playing with ringtones like "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Eric has also appeared on Nightline to discuss culture jamming and last year's response to Chevy Tahoe's consumer generated advertisements and the online backlash.

Eric earned his Masters Degree in International Development from American University in Washington, DC. He started Development Seed with Ian Ward while researching technology access and microfinance in Peru.

Ian is a true technologist. He’s an expert in all things Drupal, ranging from building modules to hosting applications to creating better backends and user interfaces. Ian uses this expertise to plan for and develop effective and efficient tools for our clients that meet their specific needs. His fascination with technology and commitment to advancing the causes our clients work to advance has led him to devise some truly innovative technological tools.

Ian has been interested in web programming for much of his life and can truthfully say he made his first hack in BASIC on one of the very first computers Apple put out. He began seriously developing on the web in the late 1990s and hasn’t stopped since. 

Prior to starting up Development Seed, Ian worked at Green Media Toolshed, an organization that build technical tools to help environmental organizations better communicate. While there, he worked on the organization’s website and administered the tools behind its online community. 

As an undergraduate and graduate student at American University, Ian studied international relations and international development and researched the impact development and environmental projects were having on communities in India.

After finishing school, Ian traveled to the mountains of Peru to study nonprofits’ use of technology and worked with local organizations to implement open source solutions to address some of the communications problems they faced. While there, he co-founded Development Seed with Eric.

Bonnie is our stage manager. She runs everything behind the scenes and makes sure team is well cared for and our business is running smoothly. She's always on the lookout for new paths to take us down and is the driving force in getting us there. 

She's also a communications strategist that we deploy for ourselves. Bonnie excels at coming up with creative and tested ways to improve messages and outreach. As a regular contributor to our blog and others, Bonnie analyzes how organizations are communicating online and, through research and firsthand experience, develops strategy guides and best practice reports to help our clients best utilize online mediums and push and pull strategies to spread their messages. She then puts these to practice on our own blog for which she directs what to write about and when and is the last set of eyes on everything that we publish.

Before coming on board at Development Seed, Bonnie ran the online communications of NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. She's also worked as a journalist, a researcher, and an online writer for nonprofits in DC and in Latin America.

Ian leads the needs analysis and planning for our client projects and guides them to completion. Having worked with a variety of nonprofit and advocacy organizations – and on the other side of web project management – Ian understands our clients’ needs. He also comes up brilliant, efficient ways to meet these needs and get results. He excels at tailoring communications strategies to meet our clients’ distinct goals and coordinates their execution with our engineers.

Ian has always been passionate about helping organizations create a better world. With a background as a writer and with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Colorado, he helped organizations with public policy communications before coming to Development Seed, particularly on HIV/AIDS and international women's health issues. Ian is also a dedicated volunteer and spends much of his free time mentoring college students and helping with strategic planning for small organizations with focuses ranging from stopping human trafficking to urban community development.

Since joining Development Seed in 2006, Ian has guided successful projects for more than 20 clients, ranging from small environmental nonprofits to large international organizations like the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the World Bank.

Alex has an amazing talent for figuring out how to make tools work better. He uses this skill to improve our news analyzer Managing News, of which he’s been the lead developer from its conception, and to devise smart workflows for multilingual websites.

Before joining the team, Alex managed information technology for Fundación Casa de los Tres Mundos, a development and cultural promotion organization in Nicaragua. While working in the country, he became involved in the Central American open source community.

His curiosity makes him regularly leave the realm of mere coding. In 2006, he conceived and organized a traveling exhibit depicting life in Nicaragua and in its sweatshops that toured in Nicaragua and Europe.

Alex also has a penchant for utopian automatons. He helped build the most human-like robot ever made (it drank beer), a pancake catapult, and a spherical virtual reality interface.

His mixture of curiosity and ability help Alex conceive and build truly innovative tools – no matter what the goals are. Aside from his excellent coding, we all cherish his cooking skills and desire to share with us Austrian delicacies.

Jeff is our resident hacker and bug fixer extraordinaire. Whenever we find a glitch in a tool or an issue that we just can’t resolve, we bring it to Jeff and he finds a way to fix the code to solve the problem. Jeff looks at problems from the long view and therefore finds solutions that fix the problems - for good. Whether it’s a cross browser bug, an onslaught of spam, or something we’ve never seen before, we count on Jeff to nail the details so our tools work smoothly. 

Since joining Development Seed in 2005, Jeff has been developing almost exclusively on Drupal. But he got his programming start long before that. Jeff has been staring at code since his family got a TRS-80 (that’s in the early 1980s for the less geeky).

Jeff tried to escape his calling as a programmer by first studying philosophy at American University and then becoming a recording engineer for local musicians and jazz clubs. He quickly returned to programming, but keeps his hobbies going, in part by sharing his philosophies at the office.

Jose is a leading developer of multilingual solutions and helped build the new multilingual system in Drupal 6. He’s a very active member of the Drupal community and has contributed to many modules, most prominently the i18n module. Jose designs the architecture and workflow for multilingual websites and creates smarter internal communications for our clients.

Young is our lead designer and uses his background in art and web technology to create powerful and purposeful websites. He has experience in a wide range of traditional media including painting, printmaking and video, as well as online media, and is a skilled open source programmer.

Young is a recent graduate of Williams College with degrees in studio art and philosophy. After moving on from ancient and postmodern philosophical paradoxes, Young became avidly interested in documentary film and social activism. He has collaborated on several public art projects, including CounterAct, an artist collaborative confronting racism in Europe, and the Feal Good Foundation's work to raise awareness about the health problems faced by first responders on September 11, 2001.

Since joining Development Seed, Young has brought a fresh perspective to our designs and has streamlined site administration and translation tools in Drupal.

Tim draws on his diverse technical, startup, and political campaign experience to bring innovative ideas, leadership, and motivation to our projects. He's also an intrepid software hacker who enjoys taking ideas and quickly turning them into working solutions. 

Before joining Development Seed, Tim assembled and led the technology team for Chris Dodd's presidential campaign where his team broke new ground in implementing innovative campaign technologies. Before joining the campaign, he set up and managed the first Drupal installation in the U.S. Senate.

Tim first became interested in open source software while studying intellectual property rights at Boston University Law School. Soon after graduating and becoming a licensed attorney and in the lead up to the 2004 election, he co-founded a PAC to support Democratic candidates nationwide. All in all, Tim has been involved with four startups during his career, all of which are still active.

Aron joined our team after jumping into Drupal development in Google’s 2006 Summer of Code. Recently he’s been working to improve aggregation in Drupal and is back at Summer of Code this year to build an aggregator module that’s extendible with an API. Aron is currently studying computer science at Budapest University of Technology.

Will built his first Drupal website in 2005 and has since built several Drupal websites on along with a widget and Facebook application for our aggregator Managing News. This summer Will is participating in Google’s Summer of Code to develop a framework to integrate Drupal and sms. In his free time, he runs the website GMRblogs where he reviews games and gaming equipment. Currently Will is studying Communications and Information Technology at American University.