About the talk:

Over the past two decades, networked technology has fundamentally changed the way we do just about everything. Consumers take for granted that they can access anything at any time from anywhere with the click of a button, which has disrupted industries as diverse as finance and education. The one industry that has not yet been fundamentally affected by these changes, however, is government. For a variety of reasons, governments have not adopted 21st century networked technologies at the speed the private sector has. This disconnect between our current technology landscape and the governments that represent us is dangerous. Code for America's mission is to bridge this gap, bringing 21st century technology into cities and by doing so fixing the relationship between citizens and government. Catherine Bracy is responsible for developing international projects at Code for America and in her talk she touches on the values and principles that animate their vision, the products they has created in collaboration with government, and their plans for building a global network of civic change agents, which starts in Kraków!

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2013

About the speaker:

A veteran of the Knight Foundation, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and most notably the technology field office of the 2012 Obama presidential campaign, Catherine Bracy spends most of her time at the crossroads of technology and public service. Currently, she’s responsible for developing international projects at Code for America, a non-profit organisation that aims to bring citizens and local government closer together through the use of technology. CfA itself is near and dear to our hearts, as it inspired us to organise last year’s Hackathon that led to the Otwarta Małopolska project.

Catherine’s role is to engage with the growing open government movement that is engaging citizens and governments in the process of governing all over the world. Even though CfA is a relatively young organisation, Catherine says that the time is right to get together, share experience and build new tools and resources that everyone can benefit from.