About Us

CitizenSpeak was started in 2002 to provide grassroots organizations and local activists with easy-to-use, powerful e-advocacy tools. Since its inception, CitizenSpeak has serviced organizations from all across the country, including formal organizations with long term goals, as well as individuals using CitizenSpeak for one-time issue-oriented actions.

In 2005, CitizenSpeak was re-launched on the CivicSpace platform to provide users with a more dynamic service. CivicSpace (formerly DeanSpace) is a growing set of online tools for building political websites based on the Drupal open source content management system. The code that runs CitizenSpeak is available as an open source CivicSpace module at http://www.civicspacelabs.com. We hope that other organizations and developers will use this free and open source software to offer e-advocacy services to their members and communities.

The CivicSpace/CitizenSpeak open source module was built by George Hotelling who also implemented the current CitizenSpeak site. The site was designed by Development Seed.

CitizenSpeak was co-founded by Jo Lee and Pablo Calamera. Pablo built the first site and provided much of the vision though was only able to participate in the project for a short period of time. Jo continues to run the service with the constant help from the larger progressive non-profit IT community and its commitmant to transparency and building a better world.

For more information about the CitizenSpeak service or launching branded versions of CitizenSpeak based on the open source CivicSpace/CitizenSpeak module, please contact Jo Lee at 401.338.5445 or jo_lee@citizenspeak.org.

Thank you for taking the time to learn about and hopefully use this service. We really to appreciate it!

About Jo Lee

Jo is responsible for managing all functional areas of CitizenSpeak including; sales, marketing, business development, public relations and finance. Jo brings more than 10 years of sales and marketing experience to CitizenSpeak. As a director of corporate communications and sales, Jo has held critical roles in numerous high technology public companies including VocalTec and World Online. She currently is a principal at Green Machine PR, a marketing and public relations firm that specializes in high-tech and green-tech companies. She is deeply grateful to the rich NPO community for making CitizenSpeak possible.