Jennifer Pahlka

Jennifer Pahlka
Pahlka speaking at the DFID/Omidyar Network Open Up! conference in 2012
Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office 30 May 2013
President	Barack Obama
Personal details
Born	1969 (age 47–48) Port Deposit, Maryland, U.S.
Occupation	Executive Director of Code for America

Jennifer Pahlka (born 1969) is the founder and Executive Director of Code for America. She served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and help 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.

She was born in Port Deposit, Maryland, and raised in Austin, New Haven, and New York City. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Yale University, and lives in Oakland, California, with her daughter and husband. On 11 April 2015 she married Tim O'Reilly.

Pahlka spent eight years at CMP Media (now part of United Business Media), where she led the Game Group, responsible for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Game Developer Magazine, and Gamasutra.com. She oversaw the dramatic growth of GDC from 1995 to 2003, and launched the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards. She was also the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an independent non-profit association serving game developers around the world. During this time she also served on the advisory boards of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the GDC, and on the board of directors of the IGDA.

More recently, from 2005 to 2009, she was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 events for TechWeb, a division of United Business Media, in partnership with O'Reilly Media. In that role, she proposed the creation of the Web 2.0 Expo, and became the co-chair for the event. She also played a key role in managing the Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo.