I am honored to have been selected as a finalist for Code for America out of over 550 applications they cut it down to fewer than 60. I know my friends and family were probably more disappointed than I was that I wasn’t selected as a fellow, it was a good experience and I learned a lot. I wish Code for America well and hope they are successful in helping make Government work better.

On Thursday, September 29th I had the honor of participating in an event to honor the 40 under Forty nominees

hosted by Santa Clarita Valley Jaycees and sponsored by the Santa Clarita Business Journal.

Not only was it an honor to be nominated but I pleased to be one of the class of 2011 honorees and share the evening with my good friend and local teacher Lyzetth Rios.

40 Under Forty Nominees

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. ~R. Buckminster Fuller

I am always amazed when I see how little we as a society are using the technologies so readily available to make our lives easier and more productive. I am a firm believer in using technology to leverage the things in our lives and society that are most important to ensure the maximum amount of impact.

Personally, I couldn’t think of a better area to utilize technology to get that maximum impact then our educational system. A system which has swirled with controversy over the past few years with everyone scratching their head looking for solutions on what to do about low test scores, budget problems and class sizes.

Being a person who doesn’t have any children I really hadn’t given it much thought. That is not until a few conversations with my fellow 40 Under Forty nominee Lyzetth Rios who is an english teacher at Golden Valley High School here in the Santa Clarita Valley. This fall Lyzetth will be teaching all the freshmen honors english classes and was looking for a way to both encourage her students and keep in touch with parents. At that juncture, I told her about the company my girlfriend Deanna has been working for edRover, which is a location based check-in mobile application similar to foursquare, however instead of just checking in to let the world know you made it to coffee shop and are moments from a latte, edRover works with Classwish.org to help raise money for education and defray some of the cost teachers pay out of pocket just to do their job. Many people don’t know that teachers pay upwards for $1200 a year for supplies.

After our chat, I volunteered to help put together a website that would help Lyzetth do things differently and help catapult her freshmen into high school on the right track. Personally, I believe teachers are the heroes in our society and we should do what we can to help them. If you have a chance stop by Missrios.com and drop Lyzetth an encouraging word or maybe got to her classwish profile and buy her some post its.

Miss Rios' Website

The City Web Team aka Drake and I, finally got the Library Website launched just in time for the library grand re-openings that happen today.
The library website was built using my illustrator comps,and Drupal with Openpublic’s CMS system. Openpublic was so happy with my design that they plan on adding it as a third theme for other government bodies to use. Openpublic also interviewed Ryan Drake about the Santa Clarita Library Website

View Openpublic Interview

I had the honor of having my Cowboy Festival website design honored by Haas & Wilkerson Pinnacle Awards Competition. I received a Silver in the Event websites Under $250,000 category.

This was the project that never ended. I actually started working on this in January 2010 to help out my friend Sgt. Harris who was put in charge of this huge project. He thinks big and didn’t want to leave anyone or anything out so this book grew from an initial estimate of 40 pages to almost 80! This book went through endless rounds of editing from Sgt Harris, to Aleks, all the way up the command lines to the head quarters of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. I won’t bore anyone with the details… but its August and we hope that it will finally get printed!

Here is one of my managers talking about Vote Santa Clarita.

Here is another article that the Signal did about VoteSantaClarita.com http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/21239/

VoteSantaClarita.com is my second project that I ran completely for the City of Santa Clarita. I created the comp in illustrator, then finished the site using XHTML and CSS. I am excited as this design was well received by the people upstairs. I am currently working on designs for the main site, I am hoping I don’t disappoint.

Thanks again Nate….you got some some love (deservingly so) from upstairs. Keep up the good work dude.

More Good News

My small web team was ranked 7th in the nation among city governments of its size category!

http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/survey/89/2009