Owen Barton joined CivicActions as Director of Engineering in 2005. He has been developing elegant solutions in Drupal for over 12 years and is widely credited with building one of the most reputable and experienced Drupal engineering teams on the planet. Owen serves as technical strategist, planner and innovation lead for nearly all of CivicActions’ clients. He is a strong advocate for agile methodologies, collaborative open source development, and user-driven development to help organizations achieve greater results online. Clients he has worked with at CivicActions include several federal agencies, the San Francisco Human Services Agency, and many NGOs, including Amnesty International, ACLU, Smithsonian Institution, Transparency International, American Public Media, Center for Reproductive Rights and Greenpeace. Before joining CivicActions, Owen worked as an independent contractor and spent five years as Technical Webmaster for the Las Cumbres Observatory. Previously, he taught science and mathematics in Malawi, Africa. Owen is an active contributor to the Drupal Security team, and co-maintains the Drush command line interface for Drupal. He has made many contributions to both Drupal core and contrib modules, ranging from accessibility improvements, through bug fixes to major new features. His work on Drupal 7 core front-end performance was sponsored by the Google “Make the Web Faster” project. He is a regular speaker and presenter at DrupalCon conferences and camps. Owen holds a bachelors degree in Environmental Science from Lancaster University. Originally from Wales, UK, he now resides in Santa Barbara, CA with his wife and three kids. In addition to his family, Owen is passionate about local organic food, alternative transportation, international development, universal health care, climbing, photography and dancing to African and electronic music.

Owen Barton is a highly experienced professional with 18 years of work experience in Drupal, PHP, web development, MySQL, and open source. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at CivicActions, where he has been developing elegant solutions for over 12 years. Owen is known for his advocacy for agile methodologies and collaborative open source development. He has worked with reputable clients such as federal agencies, the San Francisco Human Services Agency, and NGOs. Owen is also an active contributor to the Drupal Security team and co-maintains the Drush command line interface for Drupal. He is passionate about organic food, alternative transportation, international development, and universal health care.