Hi Everyone - Justin Turner

Hi Everyone. My name is Justin Turner. I am a political consultant who specializes in helping build grassroots organizations for progressive ballot measures. I have lived in Arizona for most of my life, and call it home, although I have also worked in California, Washington, New Mexico, Florida and Ohio.

As someone who runs low budget campaigns that do not have the money to hire experienced tech support people, I am constantly looking for ways to make online organizing easy and effective. Like many folks, I taught myself HTML in order to help my campaigns get a web presence and leverage the communication opportunities. I stumbled across Plone during the 2004 cycle, but found it to be way to difficult for my volunteers and staff to use, not to mention the amount of time it took me to admin.

After being impressed with what the Dean campaign was doing, I spent the off cycle familiarizing myself with DeanSpace, well really CivicSpace. I used CivicSpace during the 06 cycle and came to realize how much Drupal really had to offer. My biggest challenge now is actually getting down to implementing sites and not getting distracted by all the opportunities.

I have very little programming knowledge, usually enough to know that what I want to do can be done, but not really how to do it myself. In fact, the only formal programming training I have is one course on programming fundamentals. Basically, I learn by reading the error logs, google, and trial and error.