Jennifer Pahlka

Jennifer Pahlka
Jennifer Pahlka at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2010
Born	1969 (age 54–55) Bainbridge, Maryland, USA
Occupation	Executive Director of Code for America

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and Executive Director of Code for America, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that, according to the Washington Post, "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." 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?"

For her work re-imagining government for the 21st century, Pahlka was named a 2011 HuffPost Gamechanger. Code for America also received a $1.5 million dollar grant from Google as part of its 2011 Google Gives Back program. She was a celebrity judge for the Federal Communications Commission's Apps for Community contest, along with Marc Andreessen and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. She is scheduled to give a keynote speech at South By Southwest Interactive in 2012.

Before founding Code for America, 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.

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.

Pahlka is also a co-founder, with Sabrina Merlo and Corey Weinstein, of the East Bay Mini Maker Faire. 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."

She was born in Bainbridge, 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, and lives in Oakland, California with her daughter, her boyfriend, and five chickens.

External links

• Code for America official website
• Civic Commons, a project of Code for America
• East Bay Mini Maker Faire
• Changing Government and Tech with Geeks, Nick Bilton, The New York Times, July 6, 2010
• How an Army of Techies Is Taking on City Hall, Anya Kamenetz, Fast Company, November 29, 2010
• Innovator: Jennifer Pahlka, John Tozzi, Business Week, April 7, 2011
• Remaking Government in a Wiki Age, Chrystia Freeland/Reuters, The New York Times, August 18, 2011
• HuffPost's 2011 Game Changers: This Year's Ultimate 12, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post, October 26, 2011
• Apps for Community: Judging
• Code For America Receives $1.5M Grant From Google To Help The Government Harness Technology, Leena Rao, Techcrunch, December 14, 2011
• Code for America: An elegant solution for government IT problems, Vivek Wadhwa, The Washington Post, December 18, 2011
• Possum problems and building better government: Jennifer Pahlka at TED2012, TED Blog, February 29, 2012
• TED Video Coding a Better Government, TED.com

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