About Us

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.

Web Designer: Kevin Montgomery

Kevin joined Chapter Three in Oct. 2007 as the company's web designer. In the past, he has worked many different web projects and been active in the political arena. While getting his B.A. in politics from Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, he worked with PureVolume.com, helping build version 2 of the popular music social-networking site. He was also involved with John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign and was an activist among the Brandeis student body attempting to focus campus debate around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, culminating with President Jimmy Carter's visit to the University in Jan. 2007. Kevin also brings crazy mountain biking skills, bicycle mechanics, and delicious vegetarian cooking to the Chapter Three community. You can follow his adventures at his casually updated blog.

Systems Administrator and Developer: Andrew Ilgunas

Andrius joined the Chapter Three team in November 2007 on a part-time basis while he finished his undergrad work at Humboldt State University, CA in Industrial Technology Management with minors in Business Administration and Computer Information Systems. His traversals through the computer industry have led him from the beaches of tech support through the forest of database administration for Aetna/US Health Care to the depths of consulting for IBM culminating in the creation, development, and maintenance of a NOC/ISP (complete with dialup access) that is fully hosted from servers and modems tucked neatly in his bedroom closet. On the side, he enjoys skydiving, flying airplanes, sailing, and hacking Open Source solutions onto whatever he can get his hands on (yes, even a coffee maker).

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.