On The Ground. Building Technology in the Public Interest.

Join us for a panel with Dana Chisnell, Mikey Dickerson, and Mina Hsiang, moderated by Kathy Pham. Former leaders of the United States Digital Service will discuss their on the ground experience building technology in civic tech, public interest tech, and mission focused organizations. They will share experiences on the complexities of working in these ecosystems, understanding how and if technology should be built to better deliver services to people. Their collective decades of experience span industry, venture capital, governments, and non-profits. RSVP required.

Dana Chisnell
Founder, Project Redesign at National Conference on Citizenship; Founding Designer at United States Digital Service
Dana is a pioneer and thought leader in civic design, bringing deep experience to that space. After working with banks, insurance companies, and tech companies for decades to improve experiences for their customers and workers, Dana takes that knowledge to the government space. She has applied this work in dozens of states, and even advised election commissions in other countries. In 2019, Dana was named one of the world’s most influential people in digital government by Apolitical. She’s a partner-founder of Project Redesign at National Conference on Citizenship and adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School. 

Mikey Dickerson
CTO, Alloy; first Administrator of the United States Digital Service
Mikey is an engineer in Alloy’s Washington DC office. Long ago, when he was young and full of pep, he was a site reliability engineer and then manager at Google in Mountain View, CA. Since then he has been involved in public affairs in a number of ways, including: working on the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, overhauling the healthcare.gov web site after a less-than-perfect launch, starting and running the U.S. Digital Service at the White House as its first Administrator, and creating the nonprofit New Data Project which built and ran the voter engagement mobile app VoteWithMe. He has been described as having a “uniquely charming personality.” He wishes he had accomplished half as much as the Internet conspiracy theorists think.

Mina Hsiang
Vice-President, New Market Development and Implementation, Devoted Health; Founding Executive Director of Digital Service at U.S. Health and Human Service
Mina is the VP of New Market Development and Implementation at Devoted Health. Prior to this role, she was the Founding Executive Director of Digital Service at the United States Health and Human Services. In that role, she led the development of new products to enable better services for clinicians and patients, pioneered iterative and user-centered processes to create better polices and tools, launched APIs for real time transaction and data access, and incorporated new models of analytics and real world testing to drive decision making. Under the Obama Administration, she was also the tech lead on the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative, and the tech lead responsible for keeping healthcare.gov operational, after playing a key role in rescuing it in 2013. In the earlier days, she was the VP of Market Strategy fro Optum Analytics and a venture capitalist at General Catalyst Partners, where she sat on six boards and helped start two companies. She has worked as an engineer and clinical trial manager under DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program at Deka R&D, and has led healthcare projects in rural Malawi for the Clinton Foundation. 

Kathy Pham (moderator)
Fellow, Shorenstein Center and Adjunct Lecturer, Product Management; Product, Engineering, and Talent United States Digital Service, Moderator
Kathy Pham is computer scientist and product leader. She currently teaches Product Management and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School, and spends time with Fellowships at the Shorenstein Center, Mozilla, and the Rita Allen Foundation, focused on product management in the public interest, and responsible Computer Science. Kathy leads the Ethical Tech group at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, and recently launched The Ethical Tech Collective and Product and Society. In earlier days, Kathy was worked across product management, engineering, and talent as an early member of the United States Digital Service, and held various product, engineering and leadership roles at Google, IBM, and Harris Healthcare.

RSVP for the event here.