Jennifer Pahlka is the author of “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists. In 2010, she founded Code for America, a national nonprofit that brings the principles and practices of the digital era to government. While serving as the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House from 2013 to 2014, she helped found the United States Digital Service (USDS), which brings world-class technologists and designers to the government to improve digital service delivery. She is the winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the David Packard Award, the Oxford Internet Institute’s Technology and Society Award, the National Democratic Institute’s Democracy Award, and was selected by Wired magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past 25 years. Her 2012 TED Talk, “Coding a Better Government,” has been viewed over 1 million times. She served on the Defense Innovation Board. She holds fellowships with Ashoka, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Volcker Alliance.
