About Us: Team

<img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/assets0.localocracy.org/avatars/1/small.jpg" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 5px" /> Aaron Soules is the CTO and has been building web applications for more than 7 years. As a teenager, he built a pre-facebook social network that was used by local skateboarders. He spent two years doing Ruby on Rails development with the office of information technology at UMass and while at UMass he taught the only workshops on Ruby on Rails offered at the university. Aaron and Conor joined forces in Fall of 2009

<img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/assets0.localocracy.org/avatars/13/small.jpg" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 5px" /> Conor White-Sullivan, the CEO, studied anthropology at UMass Amherst, where he was an undergraduate fellow at the National Center for Digital Government. In the summer of 2008 he moved to Virgina to take a position as an Assistant Canvass Director at a voter registration office aiding low income and minority voters. In fall of 2008, he was the Western Mass Field Coordinator on the statewide ballot campaign which decriminalized Marijuana. Following the 2008 elections, Conor founded Localocracy through the Entrepreneurship Initiative at UMass Amhest and won the funding to start the company through the UMass Amherst Innovation Challenge. You can reach him at conor@localocracy.org

Jay Boice, lead developer, was half way through a PHD in Computer Science when he realized he would rather solve complex problems than teach about them. He co-founded Pomelo, a software consulting firm that focuses on scalable architectures, cloud computing, and geo-located systems. In 2009 he founded Happn.in, a start-up which aggregated local twitter trends and had over 200,000 users in the first few months, and had promising growth until twitter itself started doing local twitter trends. He joined the Localocracy team in 2010, holds an MS in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz, and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Localocracy’s advisory board

Jane Fountain is one of the worlds foremost scholars on the intersection of technology and governance. She is the Founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Governance, and is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Advisory Council on the Future of Government.

Jim Gilliam is a successful entrepreneur and a pioneer in web activism and the Government 2.0 movement. He is the founder of Act.ly, a twitter petition site with over 193,000 users, as well as the national platforms for citizen participation Govluv.org and Whitehouse2.org. His current project Pro.Act.ly is a campaign management tool currently being used by a candidate for US Congress in New York. He is also the former CTO of Business.com.

Baer Tierkel is one of the founders and former Executive Vice President of Worldwide marketing for PeopleSoft, and is current CEO of Red Plum Technologies and Otalo.com. Software designed by Baer has been used by millions worldwide. Baer is also currently a member of the Amherst Town Meeting.