Our Team

Aaron's background was originally in the live performance and arts arena, holding a BFA in Performance Production from Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle, WA. He began his career working in live theatre in the Pacific Northwest as a sound designer and production engineer. There he started programming show control software for automation systems and custom hardware interfaces. After building websites for various theatres as side projects, he went on to develop web applications for a variety of institutions including the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art and Dean for America's Iowa Campaign. Shortly after his work on the Dean campaign ended, he went on to found Advomatic.

Aaron was one of the first contributing developers to the Open Source content management system (CMS), CivicSpace. Civicspace is a distribution of the powerful Drupal CMS and his work often involved parallel development for both systems. He has built a variety of integral modules for Drupal, as well as a few patches to the core system. Aaron's specialty is integrating external applications with Drupal, having done so with many broadcast email and CRM systems for a wide variety of clients.

In late 2007, Aaron took a brief leave of absence to work as the Director of Internet Technology for Senator Chris Dodd's Presidential Campaign.

At Advomatic, Aaron spends most of his time developing and running the business side of things. Always finding new ways to streamline development processes and infrastructure management tasks, he ensures that Advomatic can continue to grow at the astonishing rate it has in the past few years. Aaron also manages the specialized hosting platform Advomatic offers, which focuses on highly available, highly scalable clustered Drupal hosting.

In his spare time he scuba dives and eats fire.

Adam Mordecai graduated from the University of Evansville with a BFA in Theatre, with a minor in Design. Upon graduation he moved to Los Angeles and started pounding the pavement, focusing on film production and performance. In order to pay the bills, he began doing web design and Internet consulting on the side. What started out as a hobby turned into a full time Internet marketing job in New York City, doing strategic planning for online job placement, which provided Adam with extensive knowledge of internet marketing applications.

In early 2003, Adam managed to discover a blunt spoken politician named Howard Dean. Starting as a volunteer he soon occupied a full time staff position. One thing led to another and soon he was running 15,000 person rallies in city parks. After several successful events he was shipped off to Des Moines, Iowa and tasked with developing a volunteer tracking web system that would ultimately become the Perfect Storm. He then got a crowd of Dean volunteers pumped up on caucus night, forcing a weary Howard Dean to shout over the screaming masses, which in turn, brought the campaign to a screaming halt.

After his recovery, Adam began building websites for his friends from the campaign. While Aaron built the backend of the popular sites Change For America and Joe Trippi.com, Adam designed their user interfaces. Realizing their long term potential, Adam suggested starting a company. Soon after, Advomatic was born. Along with his duties at Advomatic as Lead Designer, he also blogs at Joe Trippi's Change For America.

Adam has extensive web design experience, developing html, javascript and css sites for several years, as well as expert level knowledge of the Drupal content management system. Thanks to his time on the Dean campaign he also has developed valuable knowledge about developing internet outreach and emarketing strategies.

Aaron Winborn has been a professional web designer and developer since 1998. Before joining Advomatic, he worked as a freelance designer, developing sites for several not-for-profit organizations, small businesses, writers, and other individuals. Experienced with Drupal, he lends a helping hand to the Open Source community, of which he is proud to be a part. He has an extensive background in html, javascript, css, php, sql, and flash.

Amanda Luker is a web designer in Minneapolis, MN. She received her MA in Media Studies from The New School in 2004, and has been making websites for nonprofits, artists, writers, educators and musicians ever since. Most recently she worked as a web developer for the Science Museum of Minnesota, creating sites for Wild Music and Idea Cooperative, among other things.

Amanda is a co-founder of Twin Cities Open Circuit, a technology knowledge-sharing network that hosts open workshops and the soon-to-be Free Geek Twin Cities program. She also loves doing print design, listening to loud music, riding bikes, and volunteering at Arise!, a collectively-run bookstore in Minneapolis.

Dave has been developing websites since 2003 when he needed a web presence for the record label that he founded with several fellow musicians. In 2004 he also became the lead web developer for the Green Party of Alberta (Canada). In his search for a better web platform he found CivicSpace (The platform contributed to largely by other Advomatic developers and which evolved from DeanSpace - the platform used for the Howard Dean campaign in 2002). In 2005 Dave left his first career in music and started developing full time. Dave has also been a member of the CiviCRM development community since CiviCRM 0.8 (2005).

Dylan Clear has worked in media production - video, streaming media and web - since 1993. He began his career in the NYC area working as a multimedia producer for the AICPA, a nonprofit industry group, where he launched and produced their live webcast series. After leaving the AICPA, he worked as a Senior Webcast Producer for Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank.

A passion for the empowerment of progressive movements thorough new media led him to Bioneers, where he worked as Web / IT / Digital Media Director for 3 years, spearheading an organizational transition to enterprise-level IT networks, professional digital media production, and technology-driven operations. He also led their migration to web-based CMS and CRM software, developed by Advomatic. The new site immediately tripled the organization's earned income, and was nominated for a 2007 Webby Award in the Charitable Organizations category.

He was hired by Advomatic in 2007, where he manages web development for America's leading advocacy and progressive organizations by an international team of premier Drupal developers.

Dylan has a BA in English from Rutgers University, a Masters of Science in Information Technology from Capella University, and has studied web design and production at NYU. He is currently based in Santa Fe where he lives with his wife and two children.

What is Strategic Communications? Read more here.

Fred is an online communications strategist specializing network organizing and messaging. Before joining Advomatic, Gooltz was a political operative in traditional disciplines: director of communications, GOTV director and volunteer coordinator. Six years ago, he started using online social networks to do volunteer recruitment and coordination for Democratic candidates for office. Subsequently with Advomatic, he's created innovative strategies for clients’ electoral races, issue advocacy and fundraising campaigns.

He has presented his research and strategy innovations at conferences across the country, given trainings at online organizing camps such as NOI and he has published his research in journals such as "Person to Person: Harnessing The Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content", Institute for Politics Democracy & The Internet - George Washington University.

Some of his original outreach tactics were reviewed at Personal Democracy Forum and here.

Fred serves on the steering committee of Drinking Liberally and its umbrella organization Living Liberally. With Living Liberally, Fred developed a Swing State Project referral service in 2004 called "Do More Than Vote" which matched New Yorkers with the volunteer opportunities in NH, PA and OH that best suited them. In the 2006 Midterm elections, DMTV went national using the Drinking Liberally model.

Prior to his American political involvement, Fred worked with the London political debating society "Academic Inn" led by John Papworth, editor of London's Fourth World Review and author of "Small is Powerful" -- a book subtitled "The Future as if People Really Mattered" which informed his views of people-powered political movements.

Jack Haas has been working on site design and development since his graduation from the Art Institute of Philadelphia in 2003. Shortly thereafter, he and a few other visitors of DailyKos.com conspired to create a website, BuyBlue.org, which would closely monitor the political contributions and financial ties of major corporate CEOs to the political parties which they support.

Through the Buyblue.org project, he learned Drupal theming and has been almost exclusively working on Drupal projects ever since. He does theming work for several high-profile recording entertainment artists, progressive organizations, and startups.

John "JJ" Ark is a system administrator for Advomatic, LLC, focusing on customer contact. He began his tech career as one of the co-owners of Portland, Oregon's Habit Internet Cafe, one of the first internet cafes in the United States. From there he moved into support positions at various local internet providers, working his way into fiber optics and network monitoring at a large, now-defunct broadband provider whose name started with "E" and rhymed with "Benron." After that interesting experience, he found himself at Comcast working with their Voice Over IP systems and from there to Charter Communications where he learned cable head-end systems. After a brief stint at the State of Oregon where he was told that he worked "too fast", he took all this experience to the business support unit of Yahoo, and from there was recruited by his old friends at Advomatic.

Apart from his geek chops, JJ brings to Advomatic his love of bicycles, especially Xtracycles and Sport Utility Bikes, and his experiences in AIDS activism, human rights activism and work in the original Green Committees of Correspondence in 1989. He is married to writer and web developer Lynn Siprelle; they live in Portland, Oregon with their two daughters, two twin cats, four chickens and one flopsy dog. His favorite beverage is coffee, and he is working to outlaw the wearing of pants.

Jonathan DeLaigle is a developer in Augusta, GA. He began his professional web development career in 2006 with a publishing group called Morris Communications. Jonathan began working with Drupal in the company's Morris DigitalWorks division to accommodate the needs of various publications for Morris Communications. His team built sites such as Activote.com, Skirt.com, Falcon.com and many others.

Jonathan is currently working on his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and has received is Associates of Science in Computer Programming.

Jonathan is also an open source advocate and does what he can to help open source community. He also believes that open source principles can be applied to other things in life, not just software, and tries to incorporate that into his daily life.

It has also been said that "Jonathan has the internet running through his veins and he would surely die with out it".

Julie Blitzer developed her passion for voter outreach and grassroots politics when she volunteered with Rock the Vote and Music for America at concerts around New York City in high school. Soon after, in 2004, Julie began working in New York politics. She has experience in local, state and congressional offices, including the Manhattan district office of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY-08). Julie worked on the technology team for Mark Green for Attorney General in 2006, where she managed one of the first campaign video blogs, MG-TV, coordinated e-mail messaging and updated the campaign’s website.

While in college at Claremont McKenna, Julie was a Fletcher Jones Technology Consultant, supporting fellow students in computer labs and dorms. She was also a technology workshop instructor, teaching other employees and students how to use specialized academic software, such as SPSS, RefWorks and Adobe CS.

Julie has a B.A. in Government from Claremont McKenna College, where she wrote her thesis on the relationship between technology and political campaigns. She studied graphic design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Went to college with Adam Mordecai. They reunited in New York where she was hoodwinked into working for him. No computer skills. In real life she's a trained actor -- check out her website www.laurenberst.com which was obviously not done by Advomatic. Did we mention she has no computer skills?

Marco Carbone became a Drupal developer when he managed the Internet operations for Nevada's Question 7 campaign. He hand-built several modules that recruited hundreds of volunteers, handled tens of thousands of phone banking calls, and kept track of tens of thousands of door knocks. He participated in a GOTV push that included mobile phone messaging and interactive Google maps with voting locations. Post-election, Marco joined the Drupal development community. Wanting to give back while continuing to use Drupal for the right causes, he found a place working at Advomatic.

Marco received a B.S. in Computer Science at Tufts University, followed by his Masters and Doctoral work in the same field at Harvard University, where he studied several topics in Artificial Intelligence. Following that, he spent a year at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard Law School working on the H2O project, where he developed most of the back end of the H2O Playlist project.

Marco’s experience as an interface architect for Advomatic led him to develop the underlying architecture for Fast Company’s custom content moderation system, which is being released as a Drupal Module called Slot Machine of which he is the maintainer. In addition, he recently completed the Premium Content System, E-Commerce system, and multisite Drupal configuration for Air America Radio 2.0 in their recent relaunch. He also built the custom data system for TheMiddleClass.org, a site for the Drum Major Institute that takes congressional voting records and compares them to the issues that matter most to the middle class.