Jennifer Pahlka

Description

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 also gave a keynote speech at South By Southwest Interactive in 2012. Before founding Code for America, Pahlka spent eight years at CMP Media, where she led the Game Group, responsible for the Game Developers Conference, 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, 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 and the GDC, and on the board of directors of the IGDA. (via Freebase)