Before his current position, he was E-Democracy Research Director at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS) and Visiting Professor of Political Science at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. At Heinz, he designed the Virtual Agora Project, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded grant project investigating the political, social, and psychological effects of computer-mediated deliberative democracy and community.