Jennifer Pahlka

Pahlka founded Code for America, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that aims to make government for all people.[5] 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."[6] In her 2012 TED Talk, Pahlka 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?" [7]

Pahlka stepped down as executive director of Code for America on January 31, 2020, though remaining as an advisor and member of the Board of Directors.[8] She left the board in April 2023.[9]

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."[10] 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,[11] 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.[12]

In March 2020, Pahlka co-founded United States Digital Response, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization to provide technology volunteers to state and local governments whose systems were unable to respond adequately to the new demands put on them by the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization has fielded thousands of volunteers.[13]

In July 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Pahlka to co-lead a strike team with California Government Operations Secretary Yolanda Richardson to make recommendations for modernizing the state's backlogged unemployment systems.[14] The strike team issued its report in September 2020.[15] Among the problems uncovered by the Strike Team was that poorly designed and outdated fraud protection techniques were denying benefits to millions. Minor discrepancies in documentation supplied by applicants, like a middle initial on the application when the full middle name appeared on a supporting document like a driver's license, would cause applications to be flagged for manual review. Adoption of a modern off-the-shelf identity verification system seems to quickly solve the problem.[16]

Pahlka is also a co-founder, with Sabrina Merlo and Corey Weinstein, of the East Bay Mini Maker Faire.[17] 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."[18] As of 2015, The East Bay Mini Maker Faire attracts around 7,000 people annually.[19]