Hello.
My name is Mario Champion.
I'm insightful, structured, experienced. Also, I'm for hire.
LEADING WITH CREATIVE VISION AND TECHNICAL INSIGHT:
IT'S WHAT I DO.
-
Strategic Direction
I excel at developing directed creative strategies with strong technology underpinnings, aiming with implausible optimism, yet hitting real-world timelines with flexing budgets and resources.
There are so many good ideas, and so many worthwhile pursuits. But, the winners must connect up and down the value > vision > mission > strategy > tactics schema. Keeping in mind how the Big Picture is made of evolving little pictures, and guiding teams to the best solution is what I do.
-
for Creative & Tech Teams,
A directing, managing and core member of creative and tech teams for 15 years, focusing the varied team missions to their strengths, while bridging it all to the users, timelines and budgets is a specialty.
Having deep experience in all parts of the process, I can advocate authentically for all team members. From an education in Architecture school to visual (UI/UX) designer and game designer (with two patents), to front-end and back-end coder, to hiring/managing contractors and staffers, successfully courting investors, and spending many, many hours in Excel. Experienced in all camps, my leadership is seen as fair and clean.
-
and in-depth Coding, too.
I have signficant experience coding LAMP stack web apps, both front-end and back-end, including: php, mysql, css, jquery, ajax, APIs, bash, cron, cURL, svn, twig, twitter-bots, google analytics, remote desktop, and more.
I have also spent considerable time in the Creative Suite (photoshop, illustrator, flash, fireworks), Apple's iWorks suite (keynote, numbers, pages) but am not seeking
a design-production position.Equally at home on both mac and pc, I also enjoy a server/bash command-line challenge.
-
DIRECTOR, CREATIVE & TECHNOLOGY
FGA Media, Inc
Aug 2008 – PresentFGA Media, Inc is a startup developing a trans-media 'life-style' brand for tween girls, rooted in the Fairy Godmother Academy book series published by Random House.
My range of duties is quite varied, including approving, developing and directing creative and technology strategies for the company as a whole, as well as working with team leads to schedule and budget. It is as much delegating as doing, adjudicating as creating.
Besides being the website Executive Producer, highlights include developing, naming, structuring 'Wisdom Cards' (included with each book), guiding toy product-dev, and owning the major transformation of our Series A Investor Deck. (Before/after available with NDA.)
-
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
FairyGodmotherAcademy.com
Aug 2008 – PresentA ‘hip & wholesome,’ parent-friendly, uniquely beautiful website designed to build a perpetual online and offline community of tweens and parents into ‘a cultural force for good.’
As Executive Producer, I guide, approve and contribute to all aspects of the site, including design and tech team brainstorming sessions, conceptual/visual/UI/UX designs, online & offline 'Wisdom Acts,' staffing, budgeting, scheduling, and adapting to timeline and investor needs and expectations.
This was a fairly fast project —about 6 real months of live site development and production— with a team of 4-6 designers and small external flash and back-end team. We developed the site, original fashion designs, music, blog, Wisdom Acts as a team. I personally coded the admin, moderator, and internal tools. -
FROM CONCEPT TO CODE
HelloDreamer.com
Feb 2010Just launched, HelloDreamer.com was developed as an entertaining micro-site / satellite-site for FairyGodmotherAcademy.com, with the aim to connect a community that already invisibly exists: "dreamers" on Twitter. That is, people who tweet with '#dream', 'dreamt' and a few other keywords.
The project goals are to spark an awareness and build a community of "Dreamers," per broader FGA Media brand goals, starting with Twitter.
I developed this strategy, wrote almost all the front-end code and all of the back-end code. The site uses php/mysql/jquery/ajax/css/cURL/cron-jobs and was went from idea to public beta site in about three weeks. -
ADMIN/MODERATOR TOOLS
Fairy Godmother Academy
Aug 2009 – PresentAs it was outside the scope of our external tech team, I created several tools to help our internal team manage site-user issues.
This includes a cron-job twitter-bot cued when a nickname is pending more than a minute, free-enrollment/confirmation-email system filtered by age, a utilitarian dashboard to approve/reject nicknames & view various data slices, and a tool to send msgs to our social network users.
-
IN CASUAL, SOCIAL GAMING
Two Game Design Patents
Mar 2000 – Mar 2003A cross-mobile-desktop, casual, social game with two patents and a SXSW/Texas Interactive Media award.
Our offices, and the two game servers that backed each other up, were destroyed in a fire in 2003, but as it was conceived literally as ‘a game you could play in the dirt with a stick,’ (so that it could be WAP compatible) you can have fun playing it offline. Read the instructions at http://gridbloc.com/help
Patent #6659464 'GridBloc Strategy Game'
Patent #6578848 'Game with moveable play space'
Award for 'Technical and Creative innovation' -
DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY
TCDP Coordinated Campaign 2008
Mar 2008 – Nov 2008For the Travis County Democratic Party's Coordinated Campaign, I served as director of technology, covering many roles to convert a 10,000 sq ft warehouse into a working campaign and volunteer HQ.
Tasks ranged from installing and maintaining multiple DSL-powered wifi spots, to setting up onlinephonebanking.com surveys, creating custom data input and tracking tools for the biggest county convention in the nation, customizing a soap-blox powered community site, enabling a textmarks.com based text-msg system, building a google-map to voter address mashup, and writing custom scripts to convert FILEMAKER to MYSQL to CSV output.
-
DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY
TexansForObama.com
Nov 2006 – Nov 2008I designed, developed, and coordinated TexansForObama.com, extending a soapblox-based community blog with a volunteer and data system which recruited and organized tens of thousands of Obama supporters statewide.
Starting in Nov. 2006, I helped lead Texans For Obama from a fledgling book club into the online community and offline grassroots organization that played a critical role in delivering Texas for Obama.
Some of the Press Coverage:
In These Times: 'Hello I'm a Democrat'
Wired: 'Obama's Surging Net-Roots Campaign'
CSPAN's Washington Journal Interview
Wall Street Journal: 'The Other Campaign Trail'
-
FEEL FREE TO CHECK OUT SOME
Archived Political Projects
2003 – 2008From 2003 to 2008, I built many one-off and short-lived political organizing and campaigning tools. I also spent a couple of years running political meetings, moderating candidate debates and caucuses, and flat-out standing in crowds registering people to vote.
I organized my way to get elected as one of about 7000 National Delegates attending the convention in Denver in Aug 08, and I earned an actual, seated Silver Ticket to the Inauguration. Here are a few of the sites worth talking about, if you are so inclined.
Visit ChampionforObama.com
Visit LatinosForTexas.com
Visit TrueBlueAction.com
Visit OnlinePhoneBanking.com
SAVE YOURSELF SOME GOOGLING, HERE IS A QUICK NOTE
ABOUT ME.
MARIO CHAMPION
"If you want to understand influence,
you must understand community."
For the last several years, I have been applying my strengths toward several missions, all of which revolve around building and organizing communities. I could, and would be happy to, discuss in depth the role community plays in these missions, be they political, cultural, or business. The short-version: authentic community is self-perpetuating and the single biggest influence on people, and mostly is not online.
READ MY RESUME:
OPTIONAL LINKS:
IF YOU WANT TO
CONTACT ME:
READ MY RESUME
EMAIL IS BEST
TXT IS NEXT
512-576-0824
OR TRY THE SOCIAL NETs:
PS, I'M LOVING IT IN:
Austin, Texas 78704