Jennifer Pahlka

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, and lives in Oakland, California, with her daughter and husband. On 11 April 2015 she married Tim O'Reilly.

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.

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.

Code for America

Pahlka founded Code for America, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that aims to make government more transparent and connected. 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." 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?"

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." 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, 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.

Recognition

For her work re-imagining government for the 21st century, Pahlka was named a 2011 HuffPost Gamechanger. 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 was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2012. She also gave a keynote speech at South By Southwest Interactive in 2012.

East Bay Mini Maker Faire

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." The East Bay Mini Maker Faire currently attracts around 7,000 people annually.