Catherine Bracy

Last updated
Catherine Bracy
Catherine Bracy with Wolfie.jpg
Bracy at 2013 Code for America staff retreat
Alma mater University of Texas at Austin
Boston College
Website https://techequitycollaborative.org/

Catherine Bracy is a CEO and co-founder of TechEquity, a tax and housing policy advocacy organization whose backers include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Bracy studied communication at Boston College, graduating in 2002. [2] She wanted to be a journalist, but decided against it after completing an internship at NBC in Boston. [3]

Career

Bracy worked as Administrative Director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2010. [4] She joined the University of Texas at Austin, earning a master's degree in public policy in 2011. [3] She worked for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, managing the News Challenge, an innovation competition for journalists.

Bracy worked for the Obama administration in 2011 and 2012, heading up the technology field office in San Francisco.She helped to design the technology policy of Barack Obama. In 2013 she joined Code for America, looking after international programs. [5] [6] She served as Senior Director for Code for America, building their brigade to over 50,000 civic tech volunteers. The brigade, an international network that works with local governments to improve cities, were responsible for 64% of the total growth of civic tech in the USA. [7] [3] She became interested in civic hacking, [8]

She regularly delivers keynote talks, talking about technology and politics. [9] [10] In 2017 she delivered a TED talk Why good hackers make good citizens, that has been observed over 800,000 times. [11] [12]

She is on the board of directors of the Data & Society Research Institute and the Public Lab. [13] [14] Bracy is co-founder and executive director of TechEquity. [15] [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Zittrain</span> American law professor (born 1969)

Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It as well as co-editor of the books, Access Denied, Access Controlled, and Access Contested.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society</span> Research center at Harvard University

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Mako Hill</span> Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author

Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethan Zuckerman</span> American media scholar, blogger and Internet activist (born 1973)

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.

danah boyd Social media scholar and youth researcher

Danah boyd is an American technology and social media scholar. She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Weinberger</span> American philosopher (1950-)

David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beth Simone Noveck</span>

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University and the 1st Chief AI Strategist for the State of New Jersey. She previously served as founding Chief Innovation Officer of New Jersey. At Northeastern, she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab. She is also affiliated faculty with the Institute for Experiential AI. She is the author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix our Government and Change Our World, Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Government, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful, and co-editor of the State of Play: Law and Virtual Worlds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code for America</span> American non-profit organization

Code for America is a 501(c)(3) civic tech non-profit organization that was founded by Jennifer Pahlka in 2009, "to promote ‘civic hacking’, and to bring 21st century technology to government." Federal, state, and local governments often lack the budget, expertise, and resources to efficiently deploy modern software. Code for America partners with governments to help deliver software services, particularly to low income communities and to people who have been left out. "A large population of American citizens in poverty are not connected and exposed to government resources that they are eligible for—nearly US$60,000,000,000 worth of potential benefits for people in need remain unclaimed every year." Projects that illustrate the organization's impact include:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Pahlka</span> American political advisor (born 1969)

Jennifer Pahlka is an American businesswoman and political advisor. She is the founder and former executive director of Code for America. She served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and helped found the United States Digital Service. Previously she had worked at CMP Media with various roles in the computer game industry. She was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 conferences. In June 2023, she released the book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernest Moniz</span> 13th United States Secretary of Energy

Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), a nonprofit organization funded by the natural gas industry that works on climate and energy technology issues, which he co-founded in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Sinai</span> Adjunct faculty and a senior in the Obama Administration

Nick Sinai is a venture capitalist, adjunct faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, author, and a former senior official in the Obama Administration.

Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruha Benjamin</span> American sociologist

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She works on the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin authored People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvin Salehi</span> American technology executive

Alvand "Alvin" Salehi is an American tech entrepreneur, attorney and angel investor. He is the co-founder of Shef, Code.gov and a former White House technology advisor under President Obama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Buolamwini</span> Computer scientist and digital activist

Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist formerly based at the MIT Media Lab. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence (AI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathy Pham</span> Vietnamese American computer scientist

Kathy Pham is a Vietnamese American computer scientist and product management executive. She has held roles in leadership, engineering, product management, and data science at Google, IBM, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Harris Healthcare, and served as a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service (USDS) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States at The White House. Pham was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Product and Engineering at the Federal Trade Commission, and the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Angwin</span> American investigative journalist

Julia Angwin is an American investigative journalist, author, and entrepreneur. She co-founded and was editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology on society. She was a staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013, during which time she was on a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She worked as a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2014 to April 2018, during which time she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cristin Dorgelo</span> American science policy person

Cristin Ann Dorgelo is the senior advisor for management at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Dorgelo is the president emeritus of the Association of Science and Technology Centers, where she previously served as president and CEO. Dorgelo served as the chief of staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Barack Obama White House.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ifeoma Ajunwa</span> Nigerian writer and law professor

Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa is a Nigerian-American writer, AI Ethics legal scholar, sociologist, and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School. She is currently a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project (ISP) and she has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. From 2021–2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria where she studied the role of law for tech start-ups. She was previously an assistant professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University from 2017–2020, earning tenure there in 2020.


Cansu Canca is a moral and political philosopher, with a Ph.D. specializing in applied ethics, and founder and director of AI Ethics Lab. Formerly, she was a bioethicist at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization.

References

  1. "Community Partners".
  2. "Orientation 2001 - First Year Experience - Boston College". www.bc.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-07-22. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  3. 1 2 3 "Catherine Bracy: Organizer. Democracy Advocate. Tech Enabler". TechRepublic. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  4. "Catherine Bracy". Berkman Klein Center. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  5. "Catherine Bracy: Why I'm Coding for America · Code for America Blog Archive". Code for America. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  6. "TBC: A Conversation with Code for America's Catherine Bracy". Guggenheim. 2013-10-16. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  7. "Welcoming Catherine Bracy". Data & Society. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  8. Brodock, Kate. "Coding And Tech Skills As The Next Need-to-know Skill Sets?". Forbes. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  9. PdF YouTube (2017-06-13), Catherine Bracy | The Rise of Tech Workers as a Political Force For Good , retrieved 2018-10-24
  10. MCN (2016-11-03), MCN2016 Keynote: Catherine Bracy , retrieved 2018-10-24
  11. Bracy, Catherine (25 February 2014), Why good hackers make good citizens , retrieved 2018-10-24
  12. TED (2014-02-25), Catherine Bracy: Why good hackers make good citizens , retrieved 2018-10-24
  13. "Directors & Advisors". Data & Society. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  14. contributors, Public Lab. "Board of Directors". Public Lab. Retrieved 2018-10-24.{{cite news}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  15. "Team - TechEquity Collaborative - Team and Advisory Board". TechEquity Collaborative. Retrieved 2018-10-24.
  16. McGee, Chantel (2017-07-01). "It's time for tech to fix the wealth inequality problem in the Bay Area, says start-up CEO". CNBC. Retrieved 2018-10-24.