Jennifer Pahlka

Jennifer Pahlka (born 1969) is the founder and former Executive Director of Code for America. She served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and helped found the United States Digital Service. Previously she had worked at CMP Media with various roles in the computer game industry. She was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 conferences.

Jennifer Pahlka
Pahlka speaking at the DFID/Omidyar Network Open Up! conference in 2012
Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States
In office
30 May 2013 – June 2014[1]
PresidentBarack Obama
Personal details
Born1969 (age 51–52)
Port Deposit, Maryland, U.S.
Spouse(s)
​
(m. 2015)​
[2]
OccupationExecutive Director of Code for America

Personal life

She was born in Port Deposit, Maryland, and raised in Austin, New Haven, and New York City. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Yale University. She married Tim O'Reilly in 2015,[2] and lives in Oakland, California, with her daughter and husband.[3]

Career

Pahlka spent eight years at CMP Media (now part of United Business Media), where she led the Game Group, responsible for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Game Developer Magazine, and Gamasutra.com. She oversaw the dramatic growth of GDC from 1995 to 2003, and launched the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards. She was also the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an independent non-profit association serving game developers around the world. During this time she also served on the advisory boards of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the GDC, and on the board of directors of the IGDA.[3]

More recently, from 2005 to 2009, she was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 events for TechWeb, a division of United Business Media, in partnership with O'Reilly Media. In that role, she proposed the creation of the Web 2.0 Expo, and became the co-chair for the event. She also played a key role in managing the Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo.[3]

Code for America

Pahlka founded Code for America, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that aims to make government for all people.[4] According to the Washington Post it "is the technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America… [offering] an alternative to the old, broken path of government IT." [5] In her 2012 TED Talk, Palhlka noted that we will not be able to reinvent government unless we also reinvent citizenship, and asked "Are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we going to be a crowd of hands?" [6]

United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer

In May 2013 Pahlka announced she was temporarily taking the position of deputy chief technology officer for government innovation for the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy. She described the opportunity as her "own fellowship year of sorts."[7] Federal CTO Todd Park originally tried to recruit Pahlka to run the Presidential Innovation Fellows, a program loosely modeled on Code for America. In her role as Deputy US CTO she managed Round 2 of the program and organized the creation of Round 3,[8] but her principal goal during her year at the White House was to create something more equivalent to the UK's Government Digital Service. She set in motion the creation of the United States Digital Service within the Executive Office of the President, and helped start 18F at the General Services Administration.[9]

Recognition

Pahlka was awarded an Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute, in recognition of her contribution to digital open government in the US. For her work re-imagining government for the 21st century, Pahlka was named a 2011 HuffPost Gamechanger.[10] She was a celebrity judge for the Federal Communications Commission's Apps for Community contest, along with Marc Andreessen and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.[11] She was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2012.[12] She also gave a keynote speech at South By Southwest Interactive in 2012.[13] In 2018, Pahlka accepted the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship on behalf of Code for America[14] and she was featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes.[15]

East Bay Mini Maker Faire

Pahlka is also a co-founder, with Sabrina Merlo and Corey Weinstein, of the East Bay Mini Maker Faire.[16] In comments to The Huffington Post, she made explicit the connection between her work on open government and the Maker movement, saying, "There is a certain generation who have grown up being able to mash up, to tinker with, every system they've ever encountered. So they are meeting their relationship with government in a new way, with a new assumption: We can fix it."[10] The East Bay Mini Maker Faire currently attracts around 7,000 people annually. [17]

References
  1. "America's Tech Guru Steps Down—But He's Not Done Rebooting the Government". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-10-30.
  2. "Tim O'Reilly on Twitter: "Last night at the reception for my wedding to the incomparable @pahlkadot!". Retrieved 2016-02-17.
  3. "Speaker: Jennifer Pahlka: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011 - O'Reilly Conferences, March 28 - 31, 2011, San Francisco". conferences.oreilly.com.
  4. Code For America Receives $1.5M Grant From Google To Help The Government Harness Technology, Leena Rao, Techcrunch, December 14, 2011
  5. Code for America: An elegant solution for government IT problems, Vivek Wadhwa, The Washington Post, December 18, 2011
  6. Coding a Better Government, TED.com
  7. Camille Tuutti (May 30, 2013) "Pahlka named deputy CTO of government innovation", Fed Scoop.
  8. "Inside the Presidential Innovation Fellows program: A Q&A with the White House". Federal News Network. April 1, 2014.
  9. Scola, Nancy (August 25, 2014). "How the U.S. Digital Service could upset D.C.'s 'IT vendor ecosystem'" – via www.washingtonpost.com.
  10. HuffPost's 2011 Game Changers: This Year's Ultimate 12, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post, October 26, 2011
  11. "Apps for Community: Judging". Archived from the original on 2012-07-01. Retrieved 2011-12-24.
  12. "Jennifer Pahlka". Ashoka Fellows. Ashoka. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  13. "Code for America's Jennifer Pahlka to Inspire with SXSW Interactive Keynote". Archived from the original on 2012-01-08. Retrieved 2011-12-24.
  14. "Advice From 5 Women And A Guy Who Won $1.25 Million To Do Good". NPR.org. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
  15. "Jennifer Pahlka". Forbes.
  16. "East Bay Mini Maker Faire". East Bay Mini Maker Faire.
  17. O'Brien, Matt (2015-04-16). "Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, talks 'civic hacking'". San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved 2015-04-19.
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