Dean's Lecture

Towards a Citizen Internet: the Opportunity for Civic Software

Wednesday, March 9, 2011
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Jennifer Pahlka

The last decade has seen the organic growth of the web as a platform, enabling near-frictionless community-building, social communication, and collective action. But the institutions citizens support to represent our collective will and achieve our common goals have been left behind, largely by their own design. Today, several factors are converging to make re-crafting of government possible, and a key ingredient are the very hackers and designers who see the enormous opportunity to build a “citizen Internet.”

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She spent eight years at CMP Media where she led the game group, responsible for GDC, Game Developer magazine, and Gamasutra.com; there she also launched the Independent Games Festival and served as executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Recently, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O’Reilly Media, and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. She is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Oakland, California, with her daughter and six chickens.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016