Robert Scales is a open source business entrepreneur and international evangelist of crowd sourced journalism as a tool for social change.

As founder and CEO of web agency Raincity Studios, he is an advocate of open source software by supporting the Drupal community. He also espouses an open source business model and eagerly shares company tactics with competitors to encourage cooperation. The company is now international with offices in Shanghai and Beijing along with the Vancouver HQ.

As a citizen journalist, Scales covered the Olympic Games in Turin and Beijing bringing a "street-level" perspective to stories which the mainstream media didn't cover. Beside his own social media channels, his reports appeared in MSM outlets as diverse as the BBC, 21st Century Herald (Shanghai) and Warsaw Daily.

He also covers events from chronicling the Dalai Lama's visit to Vancouver to shooting rock bands and tech industry luminaries at SXSW in Austin, Texas. His social media forays also allow him to experiment with new mobile streaming and web publishing technologies like ComVu and Qik.

His activist roots run deep going back to his involvement in the Canada World Youth cultural exchange program as well as Student Action for a Viable Earth in the early 1990s. With these programs, he fostered an understanding about cultural and economic issues in the developing world and presented to school groups about civil disobedience, social justice, aboriginal rights and civic conundrums.

Robert holds a diploma in Business Management and a Senior Management Certificate in New Media and Web Development from BCIT and teaches eBusiness and Web Technologies at Vancouver Film School. Scales is currently working on his Phd in Media and Communication, researching the impact of social medial on the Olympic experience. He brings his global perspective to groups by organizing and presenting at (un)conferences around the world about open source tech, business and culture.