Zack started the DeanSpace project in 2003 during his summer break from the University of Illinois. He then left school to take a job at the Howard Dean presidential campaign head-quarters in Burlington, Vermont as a web-developer and technical volunteer coordinator. He was responsible for servicing the web-technology needs of the state campaign offices, constituency groups, and grassroots web developers.

Afterwards he co-founded and directed the CivicSpace project for two years. He is an active business leader in the Drupal open-source community and has freely contributed his expertise to hundreds of grassroots web projects.