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Jascha Franklin-Hodge
Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner
A BSD founding partner, Jascha brings more than a decade's experience in software development in the corporate, nonprofit, and political spheres to his role as BSD's Chief Technology Officer. He manages the company's technology staff and operations out of BSD's technology center near downtown Boston, including our infrastructure, the maintenance and enhancement of the BSD Online Tools, and our technology client services.
For Gov. Howard Dean's groundbreaking 2004 presidential campaign, Jascha led the technology team responsible for scaling, securing, and maintaining a high-visibility, high-traffic Web site, which received praise from both the political and tech communities for its usability, reliability, and depth of functionality.
Before entering the world of politics, Jascha was the director of software development for America Online's Digital Music Division. He helped architect several cutting-edge applications including Radio@AOL, Spinner, and MusicNet, as well as the digital music player Winamp. He has also worked for the Art Technology Group and Software Tool and Die (The World), and has consulted to the Computer Museum, Andiron Press, the School of The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Jascha studied computer science at MIT, and lives in Boston.
Thomas Gensemer
Managing Partner
Based in BSD's Washington, DC headquarters, Thomas provides day-to-day executive management and oversees the company's Strategy Team. He joined BSD in 2005 with a background in venture capital, strategy consulting, product marketing and technology startup management.
Immediately prior to BSD, Thomas was the director of Internet strategy for America Coming Together (ACT), where he managed the organization's online fundraising, grassroots recruitment, and marketing. Prior to ACT, Thomas led online communications for General Wesley Clark's 2004 Presidential campaign.
From 1999 to 2003, Thomas managed The Accelerator Group, an entrepreneurial venture capital fund with offices in New York, Los Angeles and London. The fund developed and funded a broad portfolio of early-stage technology and marketing businesses; its holdings included Pyra-Blogger (acquired by Google), Openwave (OPWV), 24/7 Media (TFSM), Meetup.com and a number of private concerns.
Thomas is a graduate of New York University and lives in Washington, DC and Los Angeles.
Joe Rospars
Founding Partner
A BSD founding partner, Joe has since January 2007 been on leave from BSD while serving as the New Media Director for Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, where he supervises a staff of technologists and strategists who continue to break records in online fundraising and grassroots mobilization.
Joe leads a team that has set a new standard for campaigns with a wide-ranging program that includes multimedia content, web and print design, text messaging, mass email, online advertising, and online organizing both on the campaign's own social network, My.BarackObama.com, and on sites like Facebook, MySpace and BlackPlanet.
Prior to the Obama campaign, Joe helped lead BSD's work with Gov. Howard Dean at Democracy for America, during the DNC Chair race, and during the first two years of Dean's party chairmanship. Joe was a writer and strategist for Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign.
Previously, Joe taught English in Stockholm, Sweden and had a blog about politics. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the George Washington University and lives in Chicago.
Ben Self
Program Director & Founding Partner
A BSD founding partner, Ben serves as Program Director on major accounts for BSD. He is currently serving as Technology Director at the Democratic National Committee, where he supervises a wide range of technology projects and programs, including infrastructure, compliance software, voter file technology, and a large constituency-building Web site powered by the BSD Online Tools.
During his career, Ben has developed an extensive body of experience in data analysis, data warehousing, database architecture and administration, and systems design and development. For Gov. Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, Ben served as chief data architect, responsible for reporting on, maintaining, and analyzing the complex data archive accumulated as a result of the campaign's online constituency-building program. He built the system used by the Federal Election Commission for gathering and reporting on campaign finance data, and architected the largest distributed geographic information systems (GIS) database ever deployed for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Ben holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He lives in Washington, DC and Lexington, Kentucky.
