My name is Brian Hiatt, I'm 27 years old, and at the core most of my decisions in life stem from the idea best expressed by the Dalai Lama that:
"Taking care of others, you feel good: Wise selfish," he said. "Never thinking of others, you feel alone: Foolish selfish."
I spent the first 18 years of my life growing up alongside a river in rural Loveland, Colorado. I was a geek throughout middle and high school, and spent most of my time playing games or programming with my friends. After high school I started pursuing a degree in Graphic Design at Colorado State University but ended up graduating Summa cum Laude in International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Wanting to break out of my geek-ish shell, I moved to Denver and took on a fundraising and development internship for Deproduction, a media nonprofit in Denver, and began working part-time as grants administrator and program manager for the Brett Family Foundation. I met my two greatest mentors during this period, Tony Shawcross and Maeghan Jones. I also met Sharee, my wonderful girlfriend at a New Years eve party in 2005. I really enjoyed the development work, but eventually realized the value of my primary skill set (being a geek), was of more value to the community (and myself) than the other areas I was working in.
I returned to my roots and founded Civic Pixel in 2006, a non-profit web development firm focused on ending the cycle of low quality, unsustainable websites that stem from, and feed off the scarce resources of the nonprofit and small business community. Shortly after I started Civic Pixel, Sharee joined as co-owner in the role of art director and our business was quickly overwhelmed by an unexpectedly high demand for our services. The first year and a half was difficult, with more work than we could handle compounded by the learning curve around running a business and making clear, accurate commitments around our services. As our systems and processes crystallized in early 2008, we reclaimed our weekends and the need to grow became obvious as we had hit the wall on the number of organizations we could serve.
In 2008, Deproduction received a significant grant from the Knight Foundation to develop a suite of web tools for Public Access Television stations around the country and in order to ease growth and prevent duplication of services, we decided to merge, joining forces with Deproduction and Denver Open Media in mid 2008 under the umbrella Open Media Foundation. We hired a new full time developer, a Drupal themer, as well as took on a Vista and interns bringing Civic Pixel's staff to 6.
This brings us to today. I continue to serve as the Director of Technology at Civic Pixel, and am now focused on refining our systems and developing more effective collaboration between our organization and like-minded organizations in the nonprofit / social justice / community media realm. I'm very excited for the future as more and more organizations adopt shared strategies for meeting their technical needs (Drupal, CiviCRM, and other rapidly growing open source tools). I'm also finding the time to start reaching out farther into the community, sharing my time as a board member with organizations like Colorado Progressive Action as well as spending more time with family, Sharee and exploring the community around our new home in Capitol Hill (Denver).
