At Code for America, Catherine Bracy oversees the nonprofit's community network-building initiatives, including its volunteer program and international partnership program. A resident of Oakland, California, herself, she is preoccupied with bringing together local governments and technologists in a concerted effort to make better cities for everyone.
Until the end of 2012, she ran the Obama campaign's technology office in San Francisco. She also worked on outreach for Tech4Obama, the campaign's technology affinity group. Previously, she worked at the Knight Foundation where she managed the 2011 News Challenge to fund digital innovation in journalism.
“Real community engagement is unbelievably hard; if it were easy, more people would do it. Simply finding a starting point is hard. But one place we might learn from is the SF-based organization Code For America, which is a bit like a tech Peace Corps (although it primarily serves American cities).” — The Guardian
Hacking has always been an important component of healthy democracies. Despite the bad connotation the word often has these days — indicating rogue criminals breaking into computer systems, stealing identities, spying or worse — hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system. And that “system” doesn’t have to be a technical one. […]
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