For 25 years, Colin has worked at the intersection of technology, arts, and social change to help people and communities tell their own stories and be heard. Early in his career, he helped pioneer digital storytelling for civic engagement, building one of the first national online youth media platforms and co-hosting conferences that brought together digital-rights activists, policymakers, and cultural changemakers to reimagine media's role in society.
He carried those questions into emerging digital culture, becoming an early practitioner of Creative Commons and participatory media, and later into his work at the award winning digital agency R/GA. In 2010, he founded Louder, a crowdfunded media buying platform based on a simple idea: ordinary people should have more power to decide which voices and stories receive attention. Louder helped activists and artists reach more than 35 million people beyond their existing networks before being acquired by Change.org in 2015.
At Change, Colin spent nearly a decade building products that helped people take collective action to tell their stories and create victories in their communities. As a senior product leader, he led cross-functional teams across the global platform, including rapidly developing and launching new civic fundraising products and helping guide the organization through a period of significant transformation.
In recent years, Colin has brought many of these questions closer to home. After moving with his family from Oakland to the small Russian River community of Villa Grande in Sonoma County, he became deeply involved in the civic and cultural life of the place. His work now includes The River Remembers, a community storytelling and oral-history project; Monte Rio Revival, which brings residents and local institutions together around the past and future of its historic downtown; and other efforts connecting storytelling, local knowledge, and community resilience.
That local practice is increasingly converging with Colin's work in technology and civic media. He currently co-stewards a News Futures working group exploring how accumulated knowledge about civic media can become genuinely useful to civic information actors, while also participating in an emerging communities of practitice developing relational technology - tools designed to strengthen human relationships and community capacity rather than simply capture attention.
Across these different chapters, the underlying question has remained remarkably consistent: How can media and technology give people greater agency over the stories, relationships, and collective possibilities that shape our lives?
