The Story
Where Government Tech Meets Open Principle
There is a loophole in software licensing that most people will never notice and never think about. Henry Poole noticed it in 2000, called it what it was, drove to meet Richard Stallman about it, and then spent two years writing the law - or rather, the license - to close it. The result was the Affero General Public License, published in March 2002. Today, that license underpins some of the most widely deployed software in the world: MongoDB, Nextcloud, Mastodon, Rocket.Chat. Poole's name is rarely on the marquee for any of it.
That gap between contribution and credit is something Poole seems unbothered by. CivicActions, the firm he co-founded in 2003 with Aaron Pava, operates on the same logic: build excellent things, make them public, trust that good work compounds. After two decades, that wager looks correct. CivicActions has grown into a 140-person shop working on the digital infrastructure that millions of Americans interact with - from Medicare.gov to National Science Foundation systems - with an annual revenue around $20 million and a client list that reads like a who's who of federal agencies: CMS, NSF, VA, HHS.
The company's baseline promise is simple enough to carve in granite: software built with government money belongs to the public. CivicActions does not wrap what it builds, license it back, or install proprietary lock-in. Every line of code goes open source. That's less of a marketing pitch than a condition of employment for Poole - a line in the sand drawn at the founding.
"Digital sovereignty doesn't emerge from code alone - it grows from relationships rooted in trust, stewardship, and open culture. And service firms are the keystone holding it all together."- Henry Poole, DINAcon 2025, Bern, Switzerland
Poole's argument, refined over a career that began before the commercial web existed, is that the government's technology problem is not primarily a technical problem. The bureaucratic procurement machinery - slow, risk-averse, prone to expensive vendor lock-in - is the friction that keeps good software from reaching the public. CivicActions was conceived as a counter-model: agile, open source, human-centered, and built around the kind of transparent collaboration that government agencies rarely experience from their contractors.
In practice, that means Drupal. CivicActions specializes in the open source content management system that now powers an estimated 55 percent of US government websites. It's an unglamorous specialty that carries outsized civic weight - the platforms where people apply for Medicare benefits, look up federal data, or navigate VA services tend to run on infrastructure that Poole's team has touched, built, or maintained.
The Open Data Front
In 2017, CivicActions became chief maintainer of DKAN - the open source data catalog platform that federal agencies use to publish and share public data. DKAN is the plumbing beneath a significant portion of the US government's open data infrastructure. The State of California uses it. The Department of Health and Human Services uses it. The platform creates what Poole calls "API-first open data catalogs" - technical scaffolding that makes government data actually accessible, not just technically available.
Maintaining DKAN is the kind of work that most consulting firms would quietly deprecate or price out of reach. For CivicActions, it's a feature, not a side project. Poole's view of the firm's role extends beyond delivering projects to sustaining the ecosystems those projects live in. That's a more expensive position to hold and a harder one to explain to procurement officers. He holds it anyway.
"We don't have to have a whole crew of translators to take what we do and translate it into a whole other language. It doesn't require a team of $500-an-hour experts to come in and tell you how to do it."
The License That Changed SaaS
To understand why the AGPL matters, you need to understand the problem it solved. The GPL - the General Public License that Richard Stallman had developed as the legal backbone of free software - required anyone who distributed modified software to share their changes. But "distributed" had a hole in it: if you ran modified software on a server and let people use it over the web, you weren't technically distributing it. You were providing a service. In the early 2000s, as the web matured into an application platform, this loophole was becoming something that smart lawyers and smarter companies could drive a truck through.
Poole saw it coming. In 2000, while he was running Affero, Inc. - one of the first companies explicitly built around the idea of open source web services - he went to Stallman with the problem. The conversation that followed eventually produced a new license. When Affero published the AGPLv1 in March 2002, it closed the loophole by extending the GPL's requirements to cover software provided as a network service. If you modified AGPL software and let people use it, you had to share your modifications. Full stop.
The license became AGPLv3 through the Free Software Foundation in 2007, and it is now one of the primary licenses used by companies that want to ensure their open source code cannot simply be absorbed into proprietary cloud services without reciprocal contribution. Poole joined the FSF board in December 2002 and has remained there since - more than two decades of institutional continuity in an organization that doesn't always get that.
The Founding Logic
Before CivicActions, Poole's trajectory ran through some of the early web's founding moments. In 1993, he co-founded Vivid Studios, which was among the first digital agencies to exist as a going concern. The web was young enough that "digital agency" wasn't yet a category. He served as technical editor for "Demystifying Multimedia" that same year - a period artifact from the brief moment when explaining what a CD-ROM was constituted useful publishing.
Affero, Inc., founded in 2001, was Poole's attempt to build a business that put open source at its center rather than treating it as a cost-saving strategy. The company pioneered what some call "openSaaS" - software-as-a-service built on open source foundations with the freedoms of open source intact. That experiment didn't produce a unicorn, but it produced the AGPL, which may be the more durable contribution.
CivicActions, co-founded two years later, absorbed the Affero DNA and pointed it at a specific problem: government. The timing mattered. Federal agencies were starting to grapple with digital transformation without a clear model for how to do it. The technology existed. The procurement infrastructure for acquiring it responsibly did not. Poole and Pava built a firm that could navigate both - technical enough to do the work, transparent enough to model better practices.
Modernization at Scale
CivicActions' contracts reflect the range of the federal digital stack. The $44 million NSF contract for CMS support is the kind of large-scale infrastructure work that requires reliability above all. The $18 million contract to redesign CMS.gov and Medicare.gov is the kind of project where user experience directly affects whether people can access benefits they've earned. Both are politically high-stakes, technically demanding, and in the hands of a firm that built its model around the opposite of extractive vendor relationships.
In 2020, CivicActions acquired OpenConcept Consulting, which brought Mike Gifford - one of the leading voices in digital accessibility - into the firm as Senior Strategist. The move expanded CivicActions' capacity in an area that the federal government takes seriously by law (Section 508 compliance is not optional) but often executes poorly in practice. Gifford's arrival made the firm's accessibility commitments something more than aspirational.
The result is a company that is, in some ways, boring on purpose. CivicActions doesn't have a growth-at-all-costs orientation, a venture-backed valuation ladder to climb, or a pivot story. It has agencies that need modernized systems, a team that knows how to build them, and a founder who thinks in decades rather than quarters.
The Sovereignty Argument
At DINAcon 2025 in Bern, Switzerland - a conference focused on digital and internet governance - Poole gave a keynote that framed the stakes in terms that go beyond any single contract. His argument was that digital sovereignty - a nation's ability to govern its own digital infrastructure without dependence on foreign or proprietary vendors - doesn't come from code alone. It comes from the human ecosystems that surround code: the service firms, the communities, the procurement practices, the institutional relationships that determine how software is built, maintained, and owned.
That's a more sophisticated argument than "use open source software," which is where most open source advocacy stops. Poole's version says the license is necessary but not sufficient. The firm that maintains the software matters. The culture of contribution matters. The contracts that govern the relationship matter. CivicActions, by this logic, is not just a vendor - it's a demonstration of a different model of how governments and technology can relate to each other.
Twenty-plus years in, the demonstration is still running. The results are uneven, as results in government technology always are. But the argument that it can work differently - that government software can be open, that procurement can be sane, that agencies can build capacity rather than dependency - has more evidence behind it than it did when Poole started making it in 2003.