Podcasts about Presidential Innovation Fellows

Victoria Guido hosts Robbie Holmes, the founder and CEO of Holmes Consulting Group. The conversation kicks off with Robbie recounting his initial foray into the tech world at a small web hosting company named A1 Terabit.net, chosen for its alphabetical advantage in the white pages. This job was a stepping stone to a more significant role at Unisys, working for the state of New York's Department of Social Services, where Robbie inadvertently ventured into civic tech and public interest technology. Robbie shares his career progression from supporting welfare systems in New York to becoming a technological liaison between the city and state, leading to a deeper involvement in open-source solutions. His journey through tech spaces includes developing websites, diving into the Drupal community, and eventually establishing his consulting business. Robbie emphasizes the serendipitous nature of his career path, influenced significantly by community involvement and networking rather than a planned trajectory. Additionally, Robbie gives insights on the impact of technology in public services and his stint with the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), where he contributed to significant projects like vets.gov. Robbie promotes the value of community engagement in shaping one's career, stressing how connections and being in the right place at the right time can lead to unexpected opportunities and career pivots. Follow Robbie Holmes on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbiethegeek/), X (https://twitter.com/RobbieTheGeek), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/robbiethegeek), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/robbiethegeek), or GitHub (https://github.com/robbiethegeek). Check out his website at robbiethegeek (https://about.me/robbiethegeek). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Robbie Holmes, Founder and CEO of Holmes Consulting Group. Robbie, thank you for joining me. ROBBIE: I'm so happy to be here. It's great to talk to you, Victoria. VICTORIA: Yes. I have known you for a long time now, but I don't know everything about you. So, I thought I would start with the question: What was your first job that you ever had? ROBBIE: My first technical job, I ended up working for an internet web hosting company called A1 Terabit.net. And note the A1 because it came first in the white pages. It was a really small web hosting company run by a man named [SP] Maxim Avrutsky. I worked there for about six months before I submitted my resume to an online job forum. That's how old I am. And it ended up in the hands of Unisys, where I eventually worked for the state of New York. VICTORIA: Wow [laughs]. So, what a journey that you've been on to get from starting there, and what a marketing ploy back in the day with the white pages. So, tell me a little bit more about how you went from that first job to where you are today with having your own business in consulting. ROBBIE: Yeah, I wasn't even aware that I was jumping into the sort of civic tech space and public interest technology because the job I ended up with was working for New York State in the Department of Social Services. And welfare is federally funded and distributed to states and then states to localities. And New York City and New York State have a weird parasymbiotic relationship because over 50% of the welfare in New York State goes to the five boroughs in New York City. So, so much of my job was supporting the welfare system within the city, which was run by the human resources administration. So, that just led to this cascade of me, like, getting invested in supporting that, and then eventually jumping over to the other side where I worked for the City of New York. And at that point, I ended up becoming sort of a technology project manager and almost a tech liaison between the city and state. And I was out in the welfare centers, helping get the job centers up to a new application called the Paperless Office System, which was a client-server app that was a wrapper around welfare. All of that ended up leading to me finally making it to the network operation center for the City of New York, where I started replacing expensive solutions like HP OpenView with open-source solutions like Nagios and another open-source solution that provided an interface. And it really opened my eyes to the idea of open source. And I had really paid attention to a lot of open-source operating systems. So, I was kind of just a general tech nerd. And eventually, I started building websites, and that led me to the Drupal community in New York City, which was sort of this cascade that led me to communities. And I think that's sort of a through line for my entire career is I don't really think I ever had a plan. I think my entire career has been this sort of a lucky happenstance of being prepared when an opportunity arose and sometimes being in the right place because of my connections and community. VICTORIA: That's interesting about being involved with the people around you and seeing what problems are out there to solve and letting that lead you to where your interests lie. And then, following that, naturally led you to, like, this really long career and these really interesting, big projects and problems that you get to solve. ROBBIE: Yeah. And I think one interesting aspect is like, I feel I spent a lot of time worried about what I was going to do and where I was going to do it. I don't have a bachelor's degree. I don't have an advanced degree. I have a high school diploma and a couple of years in college. Well, 137 credits, not the right 125 or 124 to have a bachelor's degree. I have enough credits for a couple of minors though, definitely Greek art history, I think mathematics, maybe one more. I just never got it together and actually got my degree. But that was so interesting because it was limiting to what jobs I could find. So, I was in the tech space as an IT person and specifically doing networking. So, I was running the network operation center. I helped, like, create a whole process for how we track tickets, and how we created tickets, and how things were moved along. And, in the process, I started building websites for family and friends. And I built a website for our network operation center, so that way we could have photos to go with our diagrams of the network. So that way, when we were troubleshooting remotely, we could actually pull up images and say, "The cable that's in port six goes off to the router. I think that port is dead. Can we move it to the port two to its right, and I'll activate it?" And that made a really interesting solution for something we weren't even aware we had, which was lack of visibility. So many of the people in the fields were newer or were trying to figure it out. And some of us had really deep knowledge of what was going on in those network rooms and hubs. It led me to this solution of like, well, why don't we just start documenting it and making it easier for us to help when they're in the field? That led me to, like, the Drupal community because I started building sites in the Drupal CMS. And I went to, like, my first Drupal meetup in 2007, and there was, like, five of us around the table. That led to eventually me working for Sony Music and all these other things. But the year before I found my way to the Drupal community, I probably sent out, like, 400 resumes for jobs in the tech space, didn't really get any callbacks. And then, I met the community, and I started attending events, and then eventually, I started organizing events. And then, Sony I interviewed and talked to them a couple of times. And then, a friend of mine became the boss. And she contacted me and was like, "Hey, are you in the market?" And I was like, "I don't know. Why? What's up?" And she's like, "I became Doug." And I was like, "What?" And she was like, "I'm now replacing Doug at Sony. I'm running the team." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm happy to talk." And that was the big transition in my career from IT to sort of development and to delivery, right? Like, when it comes right down to it, is I became the manager of interactive media at Sony Music, which was really a job I landed because I was connected to the community, and running events, and getting to know everyone. VICTORIA: Yeah. And I think it's really cool that you had this exposure early on to what you called civic tech, which we'll get into a little bit, and then you went from the community into a commercial technology space and really getting into engineering with Drupal. ROBBIE: Yeah, it was an interesting transition because what they needed at Sony was sort of somebody who could ride the line between systems engineer, database administrator, and Drupal engineer, and also probably pre-DevOps DevOps person. So, I was responsible for all deployments and all tickets that came in. I was sort of both the technical arm of the help desk. When I joined, there was 24 websites on the Drupal platform, and when I left, there was over 200. And we upgraded it from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 while I was there. So, I was heavily involved in all of those updates, and all those upgrades, and all of the deployments of all the new themes, and all the changes to all these sites. So, what was great was they, I believe, if I understand it correctly, they actually created a role for me out of, like, two or three jobs because they needed a me, and they didn't have a role that existed. So, all of a sudden, they made a manager of interactive media role. And I was able to work there for two years, sort of being what I jokingly say, like, a digital janitor. I used to say that I had, like, an eight-bit key ring in a push broom. And I was always mad at your kids for trying to break my stuff. VICTORIA: [laughs] That's so good. A digital service janitor [laughs]? The connection for me between that and where I met you in the U.S. digital service space [laughs] I feel like there's a lot of parallels between that and where your career evolved later on in life. ROBBIE: Yeah. What's amazing is I did all this early work in my career in civic tech and didn't realize it was civic tech at the time. I just realized what I was doing was providing this huge impact and was value. You know, I spent a couple of years in the welfare centers, and I used to say all the time that the two hardest jobs in the welfare center are the person applying for welfare and the person deciding whether or not that person gets welfare. So, being a technologist and trying to help make that as simple as possible or easier and smooth the edges off of that process was really important. And it really taught me how important technology is to delivering service. And I really never thought about it before. And then, when I was working for Phase2 technologies, I was a director of Digital Services. And I read in a blog post, I believe that was written by Mikey Dickerson, who was the original administrator for USDS, and he talked about HealthCare.gov. And he walked in the door, and he said, "How do you know HealthCare.gov is down?" And I think there was some allusion to the fact that we were like, we turn on the television and if they're yelling at us, we know it's down. And Mikey was like, "We know how to monitor things." So, like, if you don't know Mikey Dickerson, he's the person who sort of created the web application hierarchy of needs in Google. He was an SRE. And his pyramid, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, was all over Google when I was there. I was so impressed with the idea that, like, we aren't talking about how do we solve this problem? We're talking about knowing when there's a problem. And then, if we know there's a problem, we can put some messaging around that. We can say, like, "We're aware," right? Like if the president calls the secretary, the secretary can say, "We know it's down. We're working on it," which is building up political capital. It's a really amazing process that I kept reading this blog post, and I was like, God, that's how I would approach it. And then, I was like, wow, I wonder if I could use my skills to help America, and very shortly submitted an application and was like, well, we'll see what happens. And about six months later, I walked in the door at the VA and was the eighth employee of the Digital Service team at the VA. That was a franchise team of the USDS model. VICTORIA: And can you say a little bit more about what is the U.S. Digital Service and expand upon your early experience there? ROBBIE: Yeah. So, the United States Digital Service was created after HealthCare.gov had its issues. Todd Park had convinced President Obama to reach out to get support from the private industry. And the few of the people who were there, Todd convinced to stick around and start creating a team that could support if there was this kind of issue in the future. I believe the team that was there on the ground was Mikey Dickerson, Erie Meyer, Haley Van Dyck, and Todd. And there was a few other people who came back or were very close at the beginning, including the current administrator of USDS. She has been around a long time and really helped with HealthCare.gov. It's amazing that Mina is back in government. We're very lucky to have her. But what came out of that was what if we were able to stand up a team that was here in case agencies needed support or could vet solutions before these types of problems could exist? So, USDS was what they called the startup inside the White House that was created during the 2014 administration of President Obama. The team started that year, and I joined in May of 2016. So, I would be, like, sort of the beginning of the second team of the VA U.S. Digital Service team. So, USDS supported this idea of tours of duty, where you're a schedule A employee, which meant you were a full-time government employee, but you were term-limited. You could do up to two years of duty and work, and then you could theoretically stick around and do two more years. That was how these roles were envisioned. I think there's lots of reasons why that was the case. But what's nice is it meant that you would come in with fresh eyes and would never become part of the entrenched IT ecosystem. There are people that transition from USDS into government, and I think that's a huge value prop nowadays. It's something that I don't know they were thinking about when the original United States Digital Service was stood up, but it was hugely impactful. Like, I was part of the team at the VA that helped digitize the first form on vets.gov and all the work that was done. When the VA team started, there was a team that was helping with veteran benefits, and they worked on the appeals process for veteran benefits. And I joined. And there was a team that was...eventually, it became dubbed the veteran-facing tools team. And we worked on vets.gov, which was a new front door to expose and let veterans interact with the VA digitally. And over time, all the work that went into the tools and the solutions that were built there, everything was user-researched. And all of that work eventually got brought into VA.gov in what they called a brand merger. So, we took, like, the sixth most trafficked front door of the VA and took all the modern solutioning that that was and brought it into VA.gov, the main front door. So, all of a sudden, there was an identity, a login provided on VA.gov for the first time. So big, impactful work that many people were a part of and is still ongoing today. Surprisingly, so much of this work has now fallen under OCTO, which is the Office of the CTO in the VA. And the CTO is Charles Worthington, who was a USDSer who's the epitome of a person who goes where the work is. Charles was a Presidential Innovation Fellow who helped out in the times of HealthCare.gov and, joined USDS and did anything and everything that was necessary. He interviewed engineers. He was a product person. Charles is one of the most unique technologists and civic tech people I've ever met in my life. But Charles, at the end of the Obama administration and in this transition, realized that the VA was in need of someone to fill the CTO role. So, he came over to become the interim CTO because one of the values of USDS is to go where the work is. And he realized, with the transition, that Marina Nitze, who was the CTO who was transitioning out, there was going to be a need for continuity. So, he came in to provide that continuity and eventually became the full-time CTO and has been there ever since. So, he has helped shape the vision of what the VA is working towards digitally and is now...he was just named the Chief AI Officer for the agency. Charles is a great person. He has successfully, you know, shepherded the work that was being done early by some of us into what is now becoming a sort of enterprise-wide solution, and it's really impressive. VICTORIA: I appreciate you sharing that. And, you know, I think there's a perception about working for public service or for government, state or federal agencies, that they are bureaucratic, difficult to work with, very slow. And I think that the USDS was a great example of trying to really create a massive change. And there's been this ripple effect of how the government acquires products and services to support public needs, right? ROBBIE: Yeah, I would say there's a couple of arms of the government that were sort of modernization approaches, so you have the Presidential Innovation Fellows, which are the equivalent of, like, entrepreneurs and residents in government. And they run out of...I think they're out of the TTS, the Technology Transformation Service over at GSA, which is the General Services Administration. But the PIFs are this really interesting group of people that get a chance to go in and try to dig in and use their entrepreneurial mindset and approach to try to solve problems in government. And a lot of PIFS work in offices. Like, Charles' early team when he first became the CTO included a lot of Presidential Innovation Fellows. It was basically like, "Hey, the VA could use some support," and these people were available and were able to be convinced to come and do this work. And then, you have the Presidential Management Fellows, which I think is a little bit more on the administration side. And then, we have 18F and USDS. The United States Digital Service is a funded agency with an OMB. And we were created as a way to provide the government with support either by detailing people over or dropping in when there was a problem. And then, 18F is an organization that is named because the offices of GSA and TTS (Technology Transformation Service), where it's housed, are on the corner of 18th Street and F in DC. And 18F is sort of like having a technology or a digital agency for hire within the government. So, they are full-time employees of the government, sort of like USDS, except government agencies can procure the support of that 18F team, just like they would procure the support of your company. And it was a really interesting play. They are fully cost-recoupable subcomponent of TTS, which means they have to basically make back all the money that they spend, whereas USDS is different. It's congressionally funded for what it does. But they're all similar sibling organizations that are all trying to change how government works or to bring a more modern idea or parlance into the government. I used to say to people all the time that at USDS, you know, we would set a broken bone say, and then we would come back around and say, like, "Hey, does your arm hurt anymore?" The idea being like, no. Be like, "Cool, cool. Maybe you should go to the gym, and you should eat better." And that would be, like, procurement change. That would be, like, changing for the long term. So, all the work I was doing was building political capital so we could do better work in changing how procurement was done and then changing how the government delivered these things. So, what was awesome was, like, we used to have these fights at USDS about whether or not we were a culture change or we were firefighters. And I think the reality is once we're involved, culture changes happen. The bigger question is, are we going to be there for the long haul, or are we only there for a shorter period of time? And I think there are reasons why USDS teams had both plays. And I think it really is just two different plays for the same outcome. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. And to pivot a little bit, I think, you know, our audience, we have clients and listeners who are founders of products that are aimed at making these, like, public service needs, or to give some examples, like, maybe they're trying to track Congressional voting patterns or contact information for different state representatives, and they're trying to navigate this space [laughs]. So, maybe you can give some advice for founders interested in selling their products to government agencies. What can they do to make it more appealing and less painful for themselves? ROBBIE: I wouldn't consider myself a procurement expert, but at USDS, the procurement team called themselves the [SP] procurementati. And I was a secret member of the procurementati. I often was the engineer they would call to evaluate statements of work or sometimes be on technology evaluation panels. And it was fun to be a part of that. Things that most companies don't realize is government agencies will put out things like request for information or sources sought in the government space. And this is a way for industry to influence how government tries to solve problems. If you are trying to go after government work and you're only responding to an RFP, you're probably behind in your influence that you could have on the type of work. So, you'll see if a procurement seems to be, like, specifically focused on an approach, or a technology, or a framework, it's probably because some companies have come through and said, "I think this would probably solve your problem," and they gave examples. So, that's one way to be more connected to what's going on is to follow those types of requests. Another is to follow the money. My wife is this amazing woman who helped write The Data Act and get it passed through government. And The Data Act is the Data and Transparency Act. And that led to her heading over to treasury and leading up a team that built USAspending.gov. So, there is a website that tracks every dollar, with some exceptions, of the funding that comes out of Congress every year. And what's great is you can track it down to where it's spent, and how it's spent, and things like that. For education purposes, I think that is a really good thing that business and growth people can focus on is try to see and target where competitors or where solutions that you've looked at have gone in the past. It's just a good set of data for you to take a look at. The other piece is if you're creating a solution that is a delivery or a deliverable, like a SaaS solution, in order for something to be utilized in the government, it probably needs to be FedRAMP-approved, which is a process by which security approvals have been given so that government agencies have the green light to utilize your solution. So, there's tons of documentation out there about FedRAMP and the FedRAMP approval process. But that is one of those things that becomes a very big stopping point for product companies that are trying to work in the government. The easiest way to work your way through that is to read up on it a bunch, but also find an agency that was probably willing to sponsor you getting FedRAMP approval. Most companies start working with a government agency, get an exemption for them to utilize your product, and then you get to shape what that FedRAMP process looks like. You start applying for it, and then you have to have some sort of person who's helping shepherd it for you internally in the government and accepting any issues that come along in the process. So, I guess FedRAMP approval is one that's a little complicated but would be worth looking into if you were planning on delivering a product in government. VICTORIA: Right. And does that apply to state governments as well? ROBBIE: So, lots of state-related and city and locality-related governments will actually adopt federal solutions or federal paradigms. So, I think in the state of California, I think FedRAMP as one of the guiding principles for accepting work into the state of California, so it's not consistent. There's not a one-to-one that every state, or every city, or every locality will pull this in. But if you are already approved to be a federal contractor, or a federal business, or a federal product, it's probably going to be easier to make your way into the local spaces also. VICTORIA: Right. And as you said, there's plenty of resources, and tools, and everything to help you go along that journey if that's the group you're going for [laughs]. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: So, kind of bringing it back to you, like, you're saying you want those partnerships within the government. You want someone advocating for you or for your product or your service. Drawing that back to what you said earlier about community, like, how do you form a community with this group of people who are in the state, or federal government, or civic tech spaces? ROBBIE: Yeah, I think it's an interesting problem because so much of it feels impenetrable from the outside. Most people don't even know where to start. There are organizations out there that are pretty good community connections, an example I would give is ACT-IAC. It is a public-private partnership where people from within the government, experts in their fields, and people in the private industry who are experts in their fields will be together on community boards and engaging in panels. And so, it's a really nice way to start connecting those dots. I have no direct affiliation with ACT-IAC. But if they'd like to give me my own account, that would be great. But it is one of those organizations I've seen be successful for people trying to find their way into a community that is a little harder to find. I think, also, so much of the community engagement happens at conferences and around...so, like, if you're in the healthcare space, this last month, you've had multiple conferences that I think were really great for people to get to know one another, you know, an example is ViVE. It just happened out in LA, which is a little more on the private sector health space, but still, government agencies were there. I know that the Department of Veterans Affairs had people there and were on panels. And then, HIMSS is another conference that takes place, and that just took place down in Miami. And in Miami, HIMSS happened and a whole bunch of other social community events took place. So, I'm close with a thing called the Digital Services Coalition, which is 47 companies that all try to deliver good government based on the Digital Services Playbook that was created by USDS that lives at playbook.cio.gov and the way that they try to accomplish this work. And that organization, while they were in Miami, hosted a happy hour. So, there's a lot of connections that can be made once you start seeing the players and getting to know who's around. So, it's a little bit about trying to find your way to that first event, and I think that will really open up everything for you. Within a week or two, I was at an International Women's Day event at MetroStar, which is a really great company that I've gotten a chance to spend some time with. And then, I was at an event for the Digital Services Coalition talking about open source in government. So, there's a lot of stuff out there for you to be a part of that isn't super cost-prohibitive and also doesn't take a lot once you start to open the door. You know, once you peek around that corner and you find some people, there's a lot more to be done. VICTORIA: Yeah. And you touched on something at the end there that wants me to bring up some of the advantages you can have being a small business, a minority-owned business, or woman-owned business, or veteran-owned business, so thinking about how you can form those connections, especially if you have one of those socio and economic set-asides that you might want to consider if they're looking to work with the government as well. ROBBIE: Yeah. Those socioeconomic set-asides include small businesses, woman-owned small business. I think it's Native and Alaskan 8(a), which is historically underrepresented and service-disabled veteran-owned. So, there are also sub-communities of associations, like there's the Digital WOSB, the digital Women-Owned Small Business alliance that was founded by Jess Morris from Pluribus Digital, and a bunch of other companies in the Digital Services Coalition. I believe she's the president of the Digital WOSB right now. That is a sub-community of women-owned small businesses that are trying to connect and create a community that they can support one another. And that's just one example of the type of connection you can make through those types of socioeconomic set-asides. But once you have those official socioeconomic set-asides, it will allow you to get specific contracts engagements in the government that are not allowed or available for others. So, the government procurement process will have some amount of these specific socioeconomic set-asides that need to be hit. Like, 8% of all procurements need to go to this and 10% of all procurements need to go to this. So, I think the VA is probably one of the most effective at hitting any of the socioeconomic set-asides, specifically related to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. So, if you happen to be a person of color and you found a business and you are female presenting, right? You may have 8(a) woman-owned small business. If you also happen to be a veteran and you're service-disabled, all of those things stack. You don't just get to have one of them. And they can be really effective in helping a business get a leg up and starting out and trying to help even the playing field for those communities. VICTORIA: Yeah. What I really appreciated about my experience working with Pluribus Digital, and you, and people who had had that experience in the U.S. Digital Services, that there is this community and desire to help each other out and that you can have access to people who know how to move your product forward, get you the connections that you need to be competitive, and to go after the work. So, I love encouraging people to consider civic tech options. And maybe even say more about just how impactful some of it can be. And what kind of missions are you solving in these spaces? ROBBIE: Yeah, I often try to remind people, especially those who are heading towards or considering civic tech, there are very few places in this world that you can work on something that can impact millions of people. Sure, I was lucky enough. I have tons of privilege. I worked at a lot of wacky places that have given me the access to do the type of work that I think is impactful, but very little has the kind of impact. Like, when I was interviewed by Marina Nitze as, my last interview when I joined USDS, she sent me an email at the end of it and said like, "Everything was great. I look forward to working with you. And remember, every time you commit code into our GitHub, you'll be helping 8 million veterans." And then, she cc'd Todd Park. And Todd was the CTO of the U.S., and he responded back within a minute. Todd is one of the most busy people. It was amazing to me how fast he responded. But he was like, "Lemme tell you, as somebody who can talk on behalf of our president, our country needs you." And those kinds of things they're hard to comprehend. And then, I joined the Digital Service team at the VA. And one of the first things that I got to support was the 10-10EZ. It's the healthcare application for veterans. And before I got there, it was a hosted PDF that we were trying to replace. And the team had been working for months to try to build a new, modern solution. What it was is it was, like, less than six submissions were happening a day because it only worked in Adobe Acrobat, I think it was 6.5 and below, and Internet Explorer 8.5 and below. And if you think about the people that could submit utilizing that limited set of technologies, it was slowly becoming homeless veterans who were using library computers that had not been upgraded. So, there was a diminishing amount of value that it was providing. And then, on top of it, it was sort of lying to veterans. If the version of the Adobe Acrobat was out of date, or wrong, or too new, it would tell them to upgrade their browser. So, like, it was effectively not providing any value over time. We were able to create a new version of that and that was already well on its way when I joined, but we were able to get it out the door. And it was a React frontend using a Node backend to talk to that SOAP API endpoint. Within the first week, we went from 6 submissions a day to 60 submissions a day. It's a joke, right? We were all 10x developers. We were like, "Look at us. We're killing it." But about three years later, Matt Cutts came to a staff meeting of USDS, and he was the second administrator of the USDS. And he brought the cake that had the actual 10-10EZ form on it, and it said, "500,000." And he had checked with the analytics team, and there were over 500,000 submissions of that form, which means there are 500,000 possible veterans that now may or may not have access to healthcare benefits. Those are big problems. All of that was done by changing out one form. It opened up the world. It opened up to a group of veterans that no one else was able to do. They would have had to go into a veteran's office, and they would have had to fill it out in paper. And some veterans just don't have the ability to do that, or don't have an address, or don't have a...so, there are so many reasons why having a digital form that worked for veterans was so important. But this one form that we digitized and we helped make modern has been submitted so many times and has helped so many veterans and their families. And that's just one example. That's just one form that we helped digitize. But now the team, I mean, I'm back in the VA ecosystem. There's, like, 2,500 people in the general channel in the office of the CTO Slack organization. That's amazing. There's people there that are working all day, every day, trying to solve the same problems that I was trying to solve when I got here. And there's so much work being done to help veterans. But that's just one example, right? Like, at USDS, I know that the digital filing for the free version of your tax form, the IRS e-file Direct, just went live. That was something that USDS had been working on for a very long time behind the scenes. And that's going to impact everybody who submits their taxes. These are the kind of problems that you get to work on or the scope of some of the problems if you work in these types of organizations, and that's really powerful. It's the thing that keeps drawing me back. I'm back supporting the VA again through some contracts in my business. But it's funny, like, I was working for another agency. I was over working at DHS on an asylum project. And a friend of mine kept telling people to tell me, "Man, veterans need you. If only there was another one of you to help us over here, that would be great." And eventually, it led to me being like, well, veterans need me. I'm going to go back to the VA. And that was my second tour at USDS at the Department of Veteran Affairs. And now I'm back there again. So, it's a very impactful place to work. There's tons of value you can provide to veterans. And, to me, it's the kind of work that keeps bringing me back. I didn't realize just how much I was a, like, impact junkie until I joined USDS, and then it really came to a head. I cannot believe how much work I've gotten to be a part of that has affected and supported those who get benefits and services from the federal government. VICTORIA: [inaudible 33:47] impact junkie. That's funny. But yeah, no, thank you for sharing that. That's really interesting. Let me see if you could go back in time to when you first started in this journey; if you could give yourself any advice, what would you say? ROBBIE: Yeah, I think I spent so much time being nervous about not having my degree that I was worried it was going to hinder me forever. And it's pretty amazing the career I've been able to thread together, right? Like, you know, I've hit on a few of them already. But, like, I started with a small web hosting company, and then New York State in the Department of Social Services, then New York City in the Human Resources Administration, Sony Music, Zagat Survey, Google, Johnson & Johnson, IDT telecommunications, Phase2 technologies, where I got to work on an awful lot of problems in lots of awesome places like NBA.com, and Major League Soccer, and Bassmaster. And then, the United States Digital Service where I got to work on things supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security over at ADA.gov in DOJ. I helped them out. And I worked over at USDA helping get Farmers.gov off the ground. So, everything on my left leg, tattoo-wise, is something that changed my life from my perspective. And I have a Drupal tattoo on the back of my leg. I have a DrupalCon. So, anytime somebody said "Drupal" anywhere near a USDS person, I would magically appear because they would just be like, "Oh, Robbie has that Drupal tattoo." So, I got to work on a lot of dot govs that eventually landed or were being built in Drupal. So, I got to support a lot of work. And it meant that I got to, like, float around in government and do a lot of things that others didn't get to do. When CISA stood up, which is the office of security inside of DHS, it's one of the newest sub-communities or subcomponents, they built DHS SchoolSafety.gov, which is a cross-MOU'd site. And I got to sit in and help at the beginning of that because of my Drupal background. But it was really fun to be the person who helped them work with the vendors and make sure that they understood what they were trying to accomplish and be a sort of voice of reason in the room. So, I did all of that work, and then after that, I went and worked at Pluribus Digital, where I got a chance to work side by side with you. And then, that led to other things, like, I was able to apply and become the director of Digital Services and software engineering for my local county. So, I worked for Prince William County, where I bought a house during the pandemic. And then, after that contract ended, I had already started my own business. So, that's led to me having multiple individual contracts with companies and so many people. I've gotten to work on so many different things. And I feel very lucky. If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it's just, take a breath. Everything's going to be okay. And focus on the things that matter. Focus on the things that are going to help you. Focus on community. Focus on delivering value. Everything else will work itself out. You know, I joke all the time that I'm really good at providing impact. If you can measure my life in impact and value, I would be a very rich man. If you can measure it in money, I'm doing all right, but I'm never going to be yacht Robbie, you know, but I'm going to do okay. VICTORIA: Oh my god, yacht Robbie. That's great. So, just to recap, everything's going to be okay. You never know where it's going to take you. And don't be limited by the things that you think, you know, make you not enough. Like, there's a lot of things that you can do out there. I really like that advice. ROBBIE: And I think one last piece is, like, community matters, if you are a part of communities and you do it genuinely, how much that will impact your career. I gave a talk from Drupal NYC to the White House and beyond. And I talked through my entire resume and how everything changed when I started doing community engagement. When I went to the Drupal community in New York City and how that led to Sony, and that led to Zagat, which led to me getting acquired by Google, like, these things all cascaded. And then, when I moved to the DMV, I was able to join here and continue supporting communities, which allowed me to bring people into the local civic tech community from the local DC tech community. So, so many of the best USDS engineers, and designers, and product people I was able to help influence to come to government were people I met in the community or the communities I helped support. You know, I was an early revivalist of Alexandria Code and Coffee. It was a community that was started and then wavered. And then, Sean McBeth reached out to the community and said, "Do we want to help and support getting it off the ground again?" And I immediately said, "Yes." And then, that led to my friends at BLACK CODE COLLECTIVE wanting to create a community where they could feel safe and connected and create a community of their own. And then DC Code & Coffee started. And from there, Baltimore Code & Coffee kicked off. And it's just really nice that, like, it doesn't matter where I've been. All these things keep coming back to be a part of community and help support others. And you will be surprised at how much you get back in return. I wouldn't be the person I am today in my community. I wouldn't have my career if it wasn't for the people who started and helped shepherd me when I was starting out. And I feel like I've been trying to do the same for people for a really long time. VICTORIA: I love that. That's what I say, too, when people ask me for advice on careers and how to grow. And my biggest piece is always to go out and meet people. And go to your community, like, look and see what's happening. Like, find people you like hanging out with and learning from. And just that should be the majority of your time probably if you're trying to figure out where to go with your career or even just, like, expand as a person sometimes [laughs]. Robbie, I was going to ask; you mentioned that you had bought a house in Virginia. One of my other warmup questions was going to be, what's your favorite thing to put on the grill? ROBBIE: My house in Virginia definitely gets a lot of use, especially in the spring and the fall. I'm a big fan of team no extreme when it comes to temperature. But during those time periods, my grill is often fired up. My favorite is probably to make skirt steak on the grill. I'm a huge fan of tacos, especially made out of skirt steak. I'm in all day. That's one of my favorites. I also love to smoke. I have a smoker because I'm a caricature-esque suburban dude. I'm going to live into all of the possible things I could have. But I've had a smoker for a long time, and I love making sort of poor man's burnt ends. It's one of my favorite things to make. But you got to have some time. That's the kind of thing that takes, you know, 14 hours or 16 hours, but it's really fun to take advantage of it. A quick thing I love to make is actually smoked salmon. It takes longer to brine it than it usually does to smoke it. But it is one of the nicest things I've made on my smoker, you know, fresh pesto on a piece of salmon is pretty awesome, or everything bagel. Everything with the bagel seasoning is a pretty fun way to smoke some salmon. VICTORIA: Wow, that sounds so good. I'm going to have to stop in next time I'm in Virginia and get some [laughs] and hang out. Do you have any questions for me? ROBBIE: I'm excited to see where you've gone and how you've gotten here. I think this is such a cool job for you. Knowing who you are as a person and seeing you land in a company like this is really exciting. And I think you getting to be a part of this podcast, which we were joking about earlier, is I've been listening to probably since it started. I've been a big fan for a long time. So, it's cool to be here on this podcast. But it's also cool that my friend is a part of this and gets to be a part of this legacy. I'm really excited to see where you go over time. I know my career has been changing, right? I worked in government. Before that, I did all kinds of other stuff. Nowadays I have my own business where I often joke I have sort of, like, three things I offer, which is, like, consigliere services. Wouldn't it be nice to have a Robbie on your executive team without having to pay them an executive salary? You know, another one is like, you know, strategy and mentoring, but these are all things I know you do also, which I think is cool. But I've been working on contracts where I support companies trying to figure out how they modernize, or how their CTO can be more hands-off keyboard, or how their new director of business development can be more of a technical leader and taking on their first direct reports. So, I just enjoy all those aspects, and I just think it's something that I've watched you do in the company where we worked together. And it's always fun to see what you're working on and getting a chance to catch up with you. I feel like you're one of those people that does a really great job of staying connected. Every once in a while, I'll get a random text message like, "Hey, how you doing?" It always makes me smile. I'm like, Victoria is a really good connector, and I feel like I am, but you're even better at it on the being proactive side. That's how this all came about, right? We caught up, and you were like, "Why don't you come on the podcast?" So, that's really exciting. VICTORIA: Well, thank you, Robbie. Yeah, I think that's one of the great things about community is you meet people. You're like, "Oh, you're really cool. And you're doing cool stuff all the time. Like, how can I support you in your journey [laughs]? Like, what's up?" Yeah, for me, it was hard to actually leave DC. I didn't, you know, really think about the impact of leaving behind my tech community, like, that network of people. It was pretty emotional for me, actually, especially when we finally, like, stopped doing the digital version [laughs]. And I, like, kind of gave up managing it from California, which was kind of funny anyways [laughs]. Yeah, so no, I'm grateful that we stayed in touch and that you made time to be here with us today. Is there anything else that you would like to promote? ROBBIE: You know, just to remind you, you've done a great job of transitioning into where you are today, but anybody can do that, right? Like, before I moved to the DC area, I was in New York, and I was helping to organize JavaScript events. And I started looking at the DC area before I moved down here. And I found the DC Tech Community. And I found the Node School DC GitHub organization and reached out to the person who had ownership of it and said I wanted to help and support. I looked at this the other day. I think I moved on May 8th, and then, like, May 11th, when I walked in the door, somebody was like, "Are you new?" And I was like, "Yeah, I just moved here." And they were like, "Oh, from where?" And I was like, "New York." And they were like, "Are you that guy who's been bugging Josh about running Node school events?" I was like, "Yeah." And like, they were planning an unconference at the end of the month. And they were like, "Would you like to run a Node school at that unconference?" Like, 27 days later. So, it was amazing that, like, I immediately, like, fell from the New York Community where I was super connected, but I went out of my way to try to, like, see what the community looked like before I got there. And I was lucky enough to find the right people, and immediately I joked...I think I wrote a blog post that said like, "I found my new friends. By, like, going from one community to another, gave a person who was in his 40s a chance to meet new people very quickly." And it was pretty amazing, and I felt very lucky. But I did spend a little bit of energy and capital to try to figure it out because I knew it was going to be important to me. So, I think you've done a really good job. You've helped launch and relaunch things that were going on in San Diego and becoming a part of this connection to more people. I think you and I have a very similar spirit, which is like, let's find a way to connect with humans, and we do it pretty effectively. VICTORIA: Well, thank you. That really boosts my confidence, Robbie [laughs]. Sometimes, you show up to an event you've never been to before by yourself, and it's like a deer in headlights kind of moment. Like, oh God, what have I done [laughs]? ROBBIE: Oh, and the last thing I need to mention is I also have a podcast. I have my podcast about film. It's called Geek on Film. I used to record it with my friend, Jon. He's a little busy right now. But I used to pitch it as a conversation show about the current films that were going on. Now, it's one lone geek's ramblings about what he just saw. It's a great podcast for me because it gives me an opportunity to think a little more critically about film, which is one of the things that I probably have almost enough credits to get a minor in. But I absolutely love cinema and film in general. And it's given me an opportunity to connect with a lot more people about this subject and also to scratch the itch of me being able to create something around a community and around a thing I really love. VICTORIA: That's super cool. Yeah. You're top of mind because I also like films. I'm like, what's Robbie up to? Like, what's the recommendations, you know [laughs]? Do you have a top film recommendation from the Oscars? Is that too big of a question? ROBBIE: So, the one I will say that didn't get enough spotlight shined on it was Nimona. So, I'm a huge fan of the Spider-Man movies. I think Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse are both masterpieces. But Nimona is an animated film that was picked up by Netflix, and it is amazing. I don't know that I laughed or cried or was more moved by a film last year. And I don't know that it gets enough credit for what it was. But it did get nominated for best-animated film, but I don't know that enough people paid attention to it. Like it may have gotten lost in the algorithm. So, if you get a chance, check out Nimona. It's one of those beautiful, little gems that, if you travel down its story, there's all these twists and turns. It was based on a webcomic that became a graphic novel. One of the production companies picked it up, and it wasn't going to see the light of day. And then, Netflix bought its distribution rights. There's going to be a great documentary someday about, like, Inside Nimona. But I think the movie itself is really charming and moving, and I was really impressed with it. So, that was the one that got me, like, just before the Oscars this year, where I was like, this is the little animated movie that could, in my opinion. It's so charming. VICTORIA: I will definitely have to check that out. Thank you for giving us that recommendation. ROBBIE: Totally. VICTORIA: Final question. I just wanted to see if you had anything to share about being an advisory board member for Gray and for Hutch Studio. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? ROBBIE: Yeah. So, Gray Digital was founded by a friend of mine. We met through United States Digital Service. And his organization...I had been supporting him for a while and just being behind the scenes, talking to him and talking through business-related issues. And it was really nice. He offered to make me an official advisory board member. It was a great acknowledgment, and I really felt moved. There's some great people that are supporting him and have supported him. They've done really great work. Gray is out there delivering digital services in this space. And I think I was really lucky to be a part of it and to support my friend, Randall. Hutch is different. Hutch is an organization that's kind of like if you think about it, it almost is a way to support entrepreneurs of color who are trying to make their way into the digital service delivery space. Being an advisory board member there has been really interesting because it's shaping how Hutch provides services and what their approach is to how to support these companies. But over the last year, I've convinced the person who's running it, Stephanie, with a couple of other people, to open the door up or crack the door so we could talk directly and support the individual companies. So, it's been really great to be a Hutch advisory member to help shape how Hutch is approaching things. But I've also been a part of, like, many interview processes. I've reviewed a lot of, like, [inaudible 48:01] who want to join the organization. And I've also created personal relationships with many of the people who are part of Hutch. And, you know, like, you know me personally, so you know I run a Day of the Dead party. We'll just party at my house every year. I have a huge amount of affection for Mexican culture and, in general, the approach of how to remember people who are a part of your life. So, this is, like, the perfect way for me to bring people together at my house is to say, like, "Hey, my dad was awesome. What about your family? Who are your people?" What's really nice is that has given me an opportunity to host people at my house. And I've had Hutch company owners at my house the last couple of years and the person who runs Hutch. So, it's a really great community that I look at that is trying to shape the next emergent companies that are helping deliver digital services across the government. And it's really fun to be early on in their career and help them grow. Again, it seems silly, but it's the thing I care a lot about. How do I connect with people and provide the most value that I can? And this is a way I can provide that value to companies that may also go off and provide that value. It's a little bit of an amplifier. So, I'm a huge fan of what we've been able to accomplish and being a part of it in any way, shape, or form. VICTORIA: Well, I think that's a really beautiful way to wrap it up. ROBBIE: Really glad to catch up with you and be a part of this amazing podcast. VICTORIA: Yeah, so much fun. Thank you again so much. It was great to be here with you today. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on thoughtbotsocial@vguido. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

The Biden administration aims to hire 500 AI experts by 2025 to strengthen the federal government's AI workforce. In the first quarter of 2024, there has been a significant increase in applications for AI roles across federal agencies. The agencies have already hired over 150 AI professionals and plan to hire several hundred more by the end of summer. These hires will join through tech talent programs such as the U.S. Digital Corps and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tonyphoang/message

In this episode of the Jeff Bradbury Show, Jeff welcomes Breakout EDU Co-Founder Adam Bellow on the program to discuss the FETC conference and the future of Technology Integration.If you are a new listener to TeacherCast, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Contact Page and let us know how we can help you today!About our Guest, Adam BellowAdam Bellow began his career in the classroom as a High School English teacher. He has worked as a technology training specialist, Director of Educational Technology, and is highly sought after as a speaker and thought leader on educational technology.Adam is a serial EdTech entrepreneur and was the founder of the eduTecher, eduClipper, WeLearnedIt, and eduGames. Currently, Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Breakout EDU, the educational gaming platform that inspires learners to think outside the box by solving complex problems together. Prior to Breakout, Adam served as a Presidential Innovation Fellows for the Obama White House as well as having served as a long-time board member of the EdCamp Foundation.He is also the co-founder of two amazing kids.Links of InterestX - https://twitter.com/AdamBellow / https://twitter.com/BreakoutEDUFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/AdamScottBellow/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambellow/Web - www.BreakoutEDU.comFollow Our Podcast And SubscribeView All EpisodesApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsFollow Our HostJeff Bradbury | @JeffBradburyTeacherCast | @TeacherCastJoin Our PLNAre you enjoying the TeacherCast Network, please share your thoughts with the world by commenting on Apple Podcasts today? I enjoy reading and sharing your comments on the podcast each week.Let's Work TogetherHost: Jeff Bradbury @TeacherCast | @JeffBradburyEmail: info@teachercast.netVoice Mail:

In this episode of the Jeff Bradbury Show, Jeff welcomes Breakout EDU Co-Founder Adam Bellow on the program to discuss the FETC conference and the future of Technology Integration.If you are a new listener to TeacherCast, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Contact Page and let us know how we can help you today!About our Guest, Adam BellowAdam Bellow began his career in the classroom as a High School English teacher. He has worked as a technology training specialist, Director of Educational Technology, and is highly sought after as a speaker and thought leader on educational technology.Adam is a serial EdTech entrepreneur and was the founder of the eduTecher, eduClipper, WeLearnedIt, and eduGames. Currently, Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Breakout EDU, the educational gaming platform that inspires learners to think outside the box by solving complex problems together. Prior to Breakout, Adam served as a Presidential Innovation Fellows for the Obama White House as well as having served as a long-time board member of the EdCamp Foundation.He is also the co-founder of two amazing kids.Links of InterestX - https://twitter.com/AdamBellow / https://twitter.com/BreakoutEDUFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/AdamScottBellow/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambellow/Web - www.BreakoutEDU.comFollow Our Podcast And SubscribeView All EpisodesApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsFollow Our HostJeff Bradbury | @JeffBradburyTeacherCast | @TeacherCastJoin Our PLNAre you enjoying the TeacherCast Network, please share your thoughts with the world by commenting on Apple Podcasts today? I enjoy reading and sharing your comments on the podcast each week.Let's Work TogetherHost: Jeff Bradbury @TeacherCast | @JeffBradburyEmail: info@teachercast.netVoice Mail: http://www.TeacherCast.net/voicemailYouTube: http://www.TeacherCast.net/YouTubeiTunes: http://www.TeacherCast.net/iTunesCheck Out More TeacherCast ProgrammingTeacherCast Podcast (

In this episode of the Jeff Bradbury Show, Jeff welcomes Breakout EDU Co-Founder Adam Bellow on the program to discuss the FETC conference and the future of Technology Integration.If you are a new listener to TeacherCast, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Contact Page and let us know how we can help you today!About our Guest, Adam BellowAdam Bellow began his career in the classroom as a High School English teacher. He has worked as a technology training specialist, Director of Educational Technology, and is highly sought after as a speaker and thought leader on educational technology.Adam is a serial EdTech entrepreneur and was the founder of the eduTecher, eduClipper, WeLearnedIt, and eduGames. Currently, Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Breakout EDU, the educational gaming platform that inspires learners to think outside the box by solving complex problems together. Prior to Breakout, Adam served as a Presidential Innovation Fellows for the Obama White House as well as having served as a long-time board member of the EdCamp Foundation.He is also the co-founder of two amazing kids.Links of InterestX - https://twitter.com/AdamBellow / https://twitter.com/BreakoutEDUFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/AdamScottBellow/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adambellow/Web - www.BreakoutEDU.comFollow Our Podcast And SubscribeView All EpisodesApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsFollow Our HostJeff Bradbury | @JeffBradburyTeacherCast | @TeacherCastJoin Our PLNAre you enjoying the TeacherCast Network, please share your thoughts with the world by commenting on Apple Podcasts today? I enjoy reading and sharing your comments on the podcast each week.Let's Work TogetherHost: Jeff Bradbury @TeacherCast | @JeffBradburyEmail: info@teachercast.netVoice Mail: http://www.TeacherCast.net/voicemailYouTube: http://www.TeacherCast.net/YouTubeiTunes: http://www.TeacherCast.net/iTunesCheck Out More TeacherCast ProgrammingTeacherCast Podcast (

Former Federal Deputy CTO Jennifer Pahlka who helped found the U.S. Digital Service and other major technology programs like the Presidential Innovation Fellows has ideas for how government can leverage the opportunities in technology to advance critical services for the public. Often there is a gap between policy and implementation, especially in digital government, which can slow down modernization. But agencies can reevaluate how they provide benefits and services to the public online and strategize the evolution of digital services. Pahlka, who also wrote the book “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” discusses these strategies as well as where culture and innovation fits in the future digital age for government.

The General Services Administration (GSA) recently announced the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) cohort for 2023. That means 20 private-sector technology and innovation leaders will start pitching-in at 13 federal agencies. To learn more about this year's fellows, as well as some of the unique aspects of the program itself, Federal Drive Executive Producer Eric White spoke with Ann Lewis, Director of Technology Transformation Services at GSA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin: The latest batch of Presidential Innovation Fellows have arrived and settled in. One secret of China's military progress is its military business model. Congress is twisted in debt-ceiling knots, and it only gets worse this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin: The latest batch of Presidential Innovation Fellows have arrived and settled in. One secret of China's military progress is its military business model. Congress is twisted in debt-ceiling knots, and it only gets worse this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The General Services Administration (GSA) recently announced the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) cohort for 2023. That means 20 private-sector technology and innovation leaders will start pitching-in at 13 federal agencies. To learn more about this year's fellows, as well as some of the unique aspects of the program itself, Federal Drive Executive Producer Eric White spoke with Ann Lewis, Director of Technology Transformation Services at GSA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Adam Bellow began his career in the classroom as a High School English teacher. He has worked as a technology training specialist, Director of Educational Technology, and is highly sought after as a speaker and thought leader on educational technology.  Adam is a serial EdTech entrepreneur and was the founder of the eduTecher, eduClipper, WeLearnedIt, and eduGames. Currently, Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Breakout EDU, the educational gaming platform that inspires learners to think outside the box by solving complex problems together. Prior to Breakout, Adam served as a Presidential Innovation Fellows for the Obama White House as well as having served as a board member of the EdCamp Foundation and an advisor to Alma, a modern SIS.   He is also the co-founder of two amazing kids.   Episode 104 of the Better Learning Podcast   Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com.     Who made this episode possible? Adam Bellow BreakoutEDU Connect on LinkedIn! Follow on Twitter! Kevin Stoller Connect on LinkedIn! Follow on Twitter! Kay-Twelve Kay-Twelve Website LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile Better Learning Podcast Better Learning Podcast Website Follow on YouTube! Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) The Association for Learning Environments Website LinkedIn Profile Twitter Profile  

Kara DeFrias is the current Chief of Staff for the Intuit QuickBooks Platform, with a background rich in both private and public sector experience. Previous work includes serving as senior advisor to the leadership team of the technology and design consultancy 18F in the Obama Administration, founding TEDxIntuit, and being part of the Emmy Award-winning production staff on the Oscars. A do-gooder at heart, Kara has done pro bono digital strategy. Today on the show we talk about UX and moving into, through, and almost out of design.  Listen to learn about: Advice for newcomers wanting to get into design Seeing the world through design The importance of choosing work that aligns with your values The need for new voices in the design industry Designing in-person UX Our Guest Kara DeFrias' passion for designing engaging experiences has brought her to many exciting places, including the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and two White Houses. Kara's background is a unique mix of private and public sector experience, including 9 years with Intuit and an appointment to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. In the latter she served as entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between the government and the people from a technology perspective. Kara was Director of UX for then-Vice President Biden at the Obama White House, where she led the Cancer Moonshot work around cancer clinical trials. She then served as Senior Advisor in the Office of Technology in the Biden-Harris White House. She's currently Chief of Staff for the Intuit QuickBooks Platform team. Previous work includes Senior Advisor to 18F's Executive Director and senior leadership team, founder of TEDxIntuit, and part of the Emmy award-winning production staff on the Oscars. She also worked on the Women's World Cup press operations team and the Super Bowl. A do-gooder at heart, Kara has done pro-bono digital strategy and communications for the likes of Team Rubicon and spent 10 days in rural India teaching micro-entrepreneur women human centered design, product management, and business skills.  Kara graduated summa cum laude from Penn State University with a masters degree in instructional systems design, and was a finalist for San Diego Woman of the Year. According to her 2nd grade report card, Kara “likes to talk. A lot.”   Show Highlights [02:05] The three stages of Kara's career. [02:34] Her time in instructional design, including a graduate degree from Penn State. [03:03] Moving to California and working in the entertainment industry. [03:51] Starting work at Intuit and finding UX and design. [05:11] Working with the NJM Insurance Group New Media team on usability and user research. [06:39] Developing her UX skillset, and having a great mentor. [09:03] Some of today's challenges for new people wanting to get into design. [12:44] Advice for newcomers wanting to get into design. [13:20] Kara mentions a few good design conferences. [14:34] The need for design veterans to mentor and support, and conferences to make their spaces accessible and welcoming to new voices. [15:02] Volunteering is an important part of skillset and career development. [17:11] Kara sums up her advice. [19:56] The importance of ensuring that one's design work endures, to be used and built upon by others. [21:26] What do you do when you feel like you've done everything you can in design? [22:30] Kara's move out of design, and being Chief of Staff at Intuit. [23:46] Learning design will change how you see the world. [27:05] Kara talks about a life a-ha she had while leaving the Obama White House. [27:57] Dawan and Kara talk about aligning your values with the work you choose to do. [30:50] An early lesson Kara learned about treating one's team well. [33:18] Being OK with making mistakes publicly and taking steps to correct them. [34:54] Asking for help. [36:57] Kara and Dawan joke about a hypothetical Design Twitter Over Dinner podcast. [38:36] Why new voices are a critical need in the design community. [41:51] Book recommendations from Kara. [42:45] Kara's experience with TedX San Diego and founding TedX Intuit. [45:18] Designing great in-person UX. [47:09] Dawan closes by encouraging veteran designers to become mentors to emerging designers. Links Kara on Twitter Kara on LinkedIn Kara on Medium Kara on Women Talk Design Kara's website How to get out of your own way as a designer and get down to business Designing the Intersection of Government, Cancer, and the People Cancer Moonshot   Chicago Camps conference Button content design conference Confab content strategy conference   Book Recommendations  Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker    Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like  Your Good-Life OS: Designing a System for Living Well and Peak Performance // ALD 004 — DT101 E67 Teaching Yourself Design Thinking + Innovating in Government with Amy J. Wilson — DT101 E19 Design Thinking + Learning Science with Adam Royalty — DT101 E18 

Kara DeFrias is the current Chief of Staff for the Intuit QuickBooks Platform, with a background rich in both private and public sector experience. Previous work includes serving as senior advisor to the leadership team of the technology and design consultancy 18F in the Obama Administration, founding TEDxIntuit, and being part of the Emmy Award-winning production staff on the Oscars. A do-gooder at heart, Kara has done pro bono digital strategy. Today on the show we talk about UX and moving into, through, and almost out of design.  Listen to learn about: Advice for newcomers wanting to get into design Seeing the world through design The importance of choosing work that aligns with your values The need for new voices in the design industry Designing in-person UX Our Guest Kara DeFrias' passion for designing engaging experiences has brought her to many exciting places, including the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and two White Houses. Kara's background is a unique mix of private and public sector experience, including 9 years with Intuit and an appointment to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. In the latter she served as entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between the government and the people from a technology perspective. Kara was Director of UX for then-Vice President Biden at the Obama White House, where she led the Cancer Moonshot work around cancer clinical trials. She then served as Senior Advisor in the Office of Technology in the Biden-Harris White House. She's currently Chief of Staff for the Intuit QuickBooks Platform team. Previous work includes Senior Advisor to 18F's Executive Director and senior leadership team, founder of TEDxIntuit, and part of the Emmy award-winning production staff on the Oscars. She also worked on the Women's World Cup press operations team and the Super Bowl. A do-gooder at heart, Kara has done pro-bono digital strategy and communications for the likes of Team Rubicon and spent 10 days in rural India teaching micro-entrepreneur women human centered design, product management, and business skills.  Kara graduated summa cum laude from Penn State University with a masters degree in instructional systems design, and was a finalist for San Diego Woman of the Year. According to her 2nd grade report card, Kara “likes to talk. A lot.”   Show Highlights [02:05] The three stages of Kara's career. [02:34] Her time in instructional design, including a graduate degree from Penn State. [03:03] Moving to California and working in the entertainment industry. [03:51] Starting work at Intuit and finding UX and design. [05:11] Working with the NJM Insurance Group New Media team on usability and user research. [06:39] Developing her UX skillset, and having a great mentor. [09:03] Some of today's challenges for new people wanting to get into design. [12:44] Advice for newcomers wanting to get into design. [13:20] Kara mentions a few good design conferences. [14:34] The need for design veterans to mentor and support, and conferences to make their spaces accessible and welcoming to new voices. [15:02] Volunteering is an important part of skillset and career development. [17:11] Kara sums up her advice. [19:56] The importance of ensuring that one's design work endures, to be used and built upon by others. [21:26] What do you do when you feel like you've done everything you can in design? [22:30] Kara's move out of design, and being Chief of Staff at Intuit. [23:46] Learning design will change how you see the world. [27:05] Kara talks about a life a-ha she had while leaving the Obama White House. [27:57] Dawan and Kara talk about aligning your values with the work you choose to do. [30:50] An early lesson Kara learned about treating one's team well. [33:18] Being OK with making mistakes publicly and taking steps to correct them. [34:54] Asking for help. [36:57] Kara and Dawan joke about a hypothetical Design Twitter Over Dinner podcast. [38:36] Why new voices are a critical need in the design community. [41:51] Book recommendations from Kara. [42:45] Kara's experience with TedX San Diego and founding TedX Intuit. [45:18] Designing great in-person UX. [47:09] Dawan closes by encouraging veteran designers to become mentors to emerging designers. Links Kara on Twitter Kara on LinkedIn Kara on Medium Kara on Women Talk Design Kara's website How to get out of your own way as a designer and get down to business Designing the Intersection of Government, Cancer, and the People Cancer Moonshot   Chicago Camps conference Button content design conference Confab content strategy conference   Book Recommendations  Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker    Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like  Your Good-Life OS: Designing a System for Living Well and Peak Performance // ALD 004 — DT101 E67 Teaching Yourself Design Thinking + Innovating in Government with Amy J. Wilson — DT101 E19 Design Thinking + Learning Science with Adam Royalty — DT101 E18 

I don't usually tell stories, so I'm challenging myself to tell my career and life story in 6 or 7 chapters. Each one will be published on the StartHereFM YouTube and cross posted here to the podcast. This is getting into tech and the Chicago chapter. Next chapter will be The Presidential Innovation Fellows and DC. Email dain@hey.com if this episode helped or impacted you (any feedback encouraged). --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/startherefm/message

Harry's guest Eric Daimler, a serial software entrepreneur and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration, has an interesting argument about math. If you're a young person today trying to decide which math course you're going to take—or maybe an old person who just wants to brush up—he says you shouldn't bother with trigonometry or calculus. Instead he says you should study category theory. An increasingly important in computer science, category theory is about the relationships between sets or structures. It can be used to prove that different structures are consistent or compatible with one another, and to prove that the relationships in a dataset are still intact even after the data has been transformed in some way. Together with two former MIT mathematicians, Daimler co-founded a company called Conexus that uses category theory to tackle the problem of data interoperability. Longtime listeners know that data interoperability in healthcare, or more often the lack of interoperability, is a repeating theme of the show. In fields from drug development to frontline medical care, we've got petabytes of data to work with, in the form of electronic medical records, genomic and proteomic data, and clinical trial data. That data could be the fuel for machine learning and other kinds of computation that could help us make develop drugs faster and make smarter decisions about care. The problem is, it's all stored in different databases and formats that can't be safely merged without a nightmarish amount of work. So when someone like Daimler says they have a way to use math to bring heterogeneous data together without compromising that data's integrity – well, it's time to pay attention. That's why on today's show, we're all going back to school for an introductory class in category theory.Please rate and review The Harry Glorikian Show on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:1. Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. 2. Navigate to The Harry Glorikian Show podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.3. Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."4. Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."5. Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars. 6. Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.7. Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner. 8. If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out. 9. After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible.That's it! Thanks so much.TranscriptHarry Glorikian: Hello. I'm Harry Glorikian, and this is The Harry Glorikian Show, where we explore how technology is changing everything we know about healthcare.My guest today is Eric Daimler, a serial software entrepreneur and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama Administration.And he has an interesting argument about math. Daimler says if you're a young person today trying to decide which math course you're going to take, or maybe an old person who just wants to brush up, you shouldn't bother with trigonometry or calculus.Instead he says you should study category theory.That's a field that isn't even part of the curriculum at most high schools. But it's increasingly important in computer science.Category theory is about the relationships between sets or structures. It can be used to prove that different structures are consistent or compatible with one another, and to prove that the relationships in a dataset are still intact even after you've transformed that data in some way.Together with two former MIT mathematicians, Daimler co-founded a company called Conexus that uses category theory to tackle the problem of data interoperability.Now…longtime listeners of the show know that data interoperability in healthcare, or more often the lack of interoperability, is one of my biggest hobby horses. In fields from drug development to frontline medical care, we've got petabytes of data to work with, in the form of electronic medical records, genomic and proteomic data, and clinical trial data.That data could be the fuel for machine learning and other kinds of computation that could help us make develop drugs faster and make smarter decisions about care. The problem is, it's all stored in different databases and formats that can't be safely merged without a nightmarish amount of work.So when someone like Daimler says they have a way to use math to bring heterogeneous data together without compromising that data's integrity – well, I pay attention.So on today's show, we're all going back to school for an introductory class in category theory from Conexus CEO Eric Daimler.Harry Glorikian: Eric, welcome to the show.Eric Daimler: It's great to be here.Harry Glorikian: So I was reading your varied background. I mean, you've worked in so many different kinds of organizations. I'm not sure that there is a compact way or even an accurate way to describe you. So can you describe yourself? You know, what do you do and what are your main interest areas?Eric Daimler: Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to describe me might come from my mother. Well, where, you know, somebody asked her, is that the doctor? And she says, Well, yes, but he's not the type that helps people. So I you know, I've been doing research around artificial intelligence and I from a lot of different perspectives around my research in graph theory and machine learning and computational linguistics. I've been a venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road. I've done entrepreneurship, done entrepreneurship, and I started a couple of businesses which I'm doing now. And most notably I was doing policy in Washington, D.C. is part of the Obama administration for a time. So I am often known for that last part. But my background really is rare, if not unique, for having the exposure to AI from all of those angles, from business, academia and policy.Harry Glorikian: Yeah. I mean, I was looking at the obviously the like you said, the one thing that jumped out to me was the you were a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration in 2016. Can you can you give listeners an idea of what is what is the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program? You know, who are the types of people that are fellows and what kind of things do they do?Eric Daimler: Sure, it was I guess with that sort of question, it's helpful then to give a broader picture, even how it started. There was a a program started during the Nixon administration that's colloquially known as the Science Advisers to the President, you know, a bipartisan group to give science advice to the president that that's called the OSTP, Office of Science and Technology Policy. There are experts within that group that know know everything from space to cancer, to be super specific to, in my domain, computer security. And I was the authority that was the sole authority during my time in artificial intelligence. So there are other people with other expertise there. There are people in different capacities. You know, I had the particular capacity, I had the particular title that I had that was a one year term. The staffing for these things goes up and down, depending on the administration in ways that you might be able to predict and guess. The people with those titles also also find themselves in different parts of the the executive branch. So they will do a variety of things that are not predicted by the the title of the fellow. My particular role that I happened to be doing was in helping to coordinate on behalf of the President, humbly, on behalf of the President, their research agenda across the executive branch. There are some very able people with whom I had the good fortune of working during my time during my time there, some of which are now in the in the Biden administration. And again, it's to be a nonpartisan effort around artificial intelligence. Both sides should really be advocates for having our research agenda in government be most effective. But my role was coordinating such things as, really this is helpful, the definition of robotics, which you might be surprised by as a reflex but but quickly find to be useful when you're thinking that the Defense Department's definition and use, therefore, of robotics is really fundamentally different than that of health and human services use and a definition of robotics and the VA and Department of Energy and State and and so forth.Eric Daimler: So that is we find to be useful, to be coordinated by the Office of the President and experts speaking on behalf. It was started really this additional impulse was started after the effects of, I'll generously call them, of healthcare.gov and the trip-ups there where President Obama, to his great credit, realized that we needed to attract more technologists into government, that we had a lot of lawyers to be sure we had, we had a ton of academics, but we didn't have a lot of business people, practical technologists. So he created a way to get people like me motivated to come into government for short, short periods of time. The the idea was that you could sit around a cabinet, a cabinet meeting, and you could you would never be able to raise your hand saying, oh, I don't know anything about economics or I don't know anything about foreign policy, but you could raise your hand and say, Oh, I don't know anything about technology. That needs to be a thing of the past. President Obama saw that and created a program starting with Todd. Todd Park, the chief technologist, the second chief technology officer of the United States, is fantastic to to start to start some programs to bring in people like me.Harry Glorikian: Oh, yeah. And believe me, in health care, we need we need more technologists, which I always preach. I'm like, don't go to Facebook. Come here. You know, you can get double whammy. You can make money and you can affect people's lives. So I'm always preaching that to everybody. But so if I'm not mistaken, in early 2021, you wrote an open letter to the brand new Biden administration calling for sort of a big federal effort to improve national data infrastructure. Like, can you summarize for everybody the argument in that piece and. Do you see them doing any of the items that you're suggesting?Eric Daimler: Right. The the idea is that despite us making some real good efforts during the Obama administration with solidifying our, I'll say, our view on artificial intelligence across the executive, and this continuing actually into the Trump administration with the establishment of an AI office inside the OSTP. So credit where credit is due. That extended into the the Biden administration, where some very well-meaning people can be focusing on different parts of the the conundrum of AI expressions, having various distortions. You know, the popular one we will read about is this distortion of bias that can express itself in really ugly ways, as you know, as individuals, especially for underrepresented groups. The point of the article was to help others be reminded of of some of the easy, low hanging fruit that we can that we can work on around AI. So, you know, bias comes in a lot of different ways, the same way we all have cognitive distortions, you know, cognitive biases. There are some like 50 of them, right. You know, bias can happen around gender and ethnicity and age, sexual orientation and so forth. You know, it all can also can come from absence of data. There's a type of bias that's present just by being in a developed, rich country in collecting, for example, with Conexus's customers, my company Conexus's customers, where they are trying to report on their good efforts for economic and social good and around clean, renewable energies, they find that there's a bias in being able to collect data in rich countries versus developing countries.Eric Daimler: That's another type of bias. So that was that was the point of me writing that open letter, to prioritize, these letters. It's just to distinguish what the low hanging fruit was versus some of the hard problems. The, some of tthe low hanging fruit, I think is available, I can say, In three easy parts that people can remember. One is circuit breakers. So we we can have circuit breakers in a lot of different parts of these automated systems. You know, automated car rolling down a road is, is the easiest example where, you know, at some point a driver needs to take over control to determine to make a judgment about that shadow being a person or a tumbleweed on the crosswalk, that's a type of circuit breaker. We can have those circuit breakers in a lot of different automated systems. Another one is an audit. And the way I mean is audit is having people like me or just generally people that are experts in the craft being able to distinguish the data or the biases can become possible from the data model algorithms where biases also can become possible. Right. And we get a lot of efficiency from these automated systems, these learning algorithms. I think we can afford a little bit taken off to audit the degree to which these data models are doing what we intend.Eric Daimler: And an example of a data model is that Delta Airlines, you know, they know my age or my height, and I fly to San Francisco, to New York or some such thing. The data model would be their own proprietary algorithm to determine whether or not I am deserving of an upgrade to first class, for example. That's a data model. We can have other data models. A famous one that we all are part of is FICO scores, credit scores, and those don't have to be disclosed. None of us actually know what Experian or any of the credit agencies used to determine our credit scores. But they they use these type of things called zero knowledge proofs, where we just send through enough data, enough times that we can get to a sense of what those data models are. So that's an exposure of a data model. A declarative exposure would be maybe a next best thing, a next step, and that's a type of audit.Eric Daimler: And then the third low hanging fruit, I'd say, around regulation, and I think these are just coming towards eventualities, is demanding lineage or demanding provenance. You know, you'll see a lot of news reports, often on less credible sites, but sometimes on on shockingly credible sites where claims are made that you need to then search yourself and, you know, people in a hurry just won't do it, when these become very large systems and very large systems of information, alert systems of automation, I want to know: How were these conclusions given? So, you know, an example in health care would be if my clinician gave me a diagnosis of, let's say, some sort of cancer. And then to say, you know, here's a drug, by the way, and there's a five chance, 5 percent chance of there being some awful side effects. You know, that's a connection of causation or a connection of of conclusions that I'm really not comfortable with. You know, I want to know, like, every step is like, wait, wait. So, so what type of cancer? So what's the probability of my cancer? You know, where is it? And so what drug, you know, how did you make that decision? You know, I want to know every little step of the way. It's fine that they give me that conclusion, but I want to be able to back that up. You know, a similar example, just in everyday parlance for people would be if I did suddenly to say I want a house, and then houses are presented to me. I don't quite want that. Although that looks like good for a Hollywood narrative. Right? I want to say, oh, wait, what's my income? Or what's my cash? You know, how much? And then what's my credit? Like, how much can I afford? Oh, these are houses you can kind of afford. Like, I want those little steps or at least want to back out how those decisions were made available. That's a lineage. So those three things, circuit breaker, audit, lineage, those are three pieces of low hanging fruit that I think the European Union, the State of New York and other other government entities would be well served to prioritize.Harry Glorikian: I would love all of them, especially, you know, the health care example, although I'm not holding my breath because I might not come back to life by how long I'd have to hold my breath on that one. But we're hoping for the best and we talk about that on the show all the time. But you mentioned Conexus. You're one of three co founders, I believe. If I'm not mistaken, Conexus is the first ever commercial spin out from MIT's math department. The company is in the area of large scale data integration, building on insights that come out of the field of mathematics that's called category algebra, categorical algebra, or something called enterprise category theory. And to be quite honest, I did have to Wikipedia to sort of look that up, was not familiar with it. So can you explain category algebra in terms of a non mathematician and maybe give us an example that someone can wrap their mind around.Eric Daimler: Yeah. Yeah. And it's important to get into because even though what my company does is, Conexus does a software expression of categorical algebra, it's really beginning to permeate our world. You know, the the way I tell my my nieces and nephews is, what do quantum computers, smart contracts and Minecraft all have in common? And the answer is composability. You know, they are actually all composable. And what composable is, is it's kind of related to modularity, but it's modularity without regard to scale. So the the easy analogy is in trains where, yeah, you can swap out a boxcar in a train, but mostly trains can only get to be a couple of miles long. Swap in and out boxcars, but the train is really limited in scale. Whereas the train system, the system of a train can be infinitely large, infinitely complex. At every point in the track you can have another track. That is the difference between modularity and composability. So Minecraft is infinitely self referential where you have a whole 'nother universe that exists in and around Minecraft. In smart contracts is actually not enabled without the ability to prove the efficacy, which is then enabled by categorical algebra or its sister in math, type theory. They're kind of adjacent. And that's similar to quantum computing. So quantum computing is very sexy. It gets in the press quite frequently with forks and all, all that. If it you wouldn't be able to prove the efficacy of a quantum compiler, you wouldn't actually. Humans can't actually say whether it's true or not without type theory or categorical algebra.Eric Daimler: How you think of kind categorical algebra you can think of as a little bit related to graph theory. Graph theory is those things that you see, they look like spider webs. If you see the visualizations of graph theories are graphs. Category theory is a little bit related, you might say, to graph theory, but with more structure or more semantics or richness. So in each point, each node and each edge, in the vernacular, you can you can put an infinite amount of information. That's really what a categorical algebra allows. This, the discovery, this was invented to be translating math between different domains of math. The discovery in 2011 from one of my co-founders, who was faculty at MIT's Math Department, was that we could apply that to databases. And it's in that the whole world opens up. This solves the problem that that bedeviled the good folks trying to work on healthcare.gov. It allows for a good explanation of how we can prevent the next 737 Max disaster, where individual systems certainly can be formally verified. But the whole plane doesn't have a mechanism of being formally verified with classic approaches. And it also has application in drug discovery, where we have a way of bringing together hundreds of thousands of databases in a formal way without risk of data being misinterpreted, which is a big deal when you have a 10-year time horizon for FDA trials and you have multiple teams coming in and out of data sets and and human instinct to hoard data and a concern about it ever becoming corrupted. This math and the software expression built upon it opens up just a fantastically rich new world of opportunity for for drug discovery and for clinicians and for health care delivery. And the list is quite, quite deep.Harry Glorikian: So. What does Conexus provide its clients? Is it a service? Is it a technology? Is it both? Can you give us an example of it?Eric Daimler: Yeah. So Conexus is software. Conexus is enterprise software. It's an enterprise software platform that works generally with very large organizations that have generally very large complex data data infrastructures. You know the example, I can start in health care and then I can I can move to an even bigger one, was with a hospital group that we work with in New York City. I didn't even know health care groups could really have this problem. But it's endemic to really the world's data, where one group within the same hospital had a particular way that they represented diabetes. Now to a layman, layman in a health care sense, I would think, well, there's a definition of diabetes. I can just look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. But this particular domain found diabetes to just be easily represented as yes, no. Do they have it? Do they not? Another group within the same hospital group thought that they would represent it as diabetes, ow are we treating it? A third group would be representing it as diabetes, how long ago. And then a fourth group had some well-meaning clinicians that would characterize it as, they had it and they have less now or, you know, type one, type two, you know, with a more more nuanced view.Eric Daimler: The traditional way of capturing that data, whether it's for drug discovery or whether it's for delivery, is to normalize it, which would then squash the fidelity of the data collected within those groups. Or they most likely to actually just wouldn't do it. They wouldn't collect the data, they wouldn't bring the data together because it's just too hard, it's too expensive. They would use these processes called ETL, extract, transform, load, that have been around for 30 years but are often slow, expensive, fragile. They could take six months to year, cost $1,000,000, deploy 50 to 100 people generally from Accenture or Deloitte or Tata or Wipro. You know, that's a burden. It's a burden, you know, so the data wasn't available and that would then impair the researchers and their ability to to share data. And it would impair clinicians in their view of patient care. And it also impaired the people in operations where they would work on billing. So we work with one company right now that that works on 1.4 trillion records a year. And they just have trouble with that volume and the number of databases and the heterogeneous data infrastructure, bringing together that data to give them one view that then can facilitate health care delivery. Eric Daimler: The big example is, we work with Uber where they they have a very smart team, as smart as one might think. They also have an effectively infinite balance sheet with which they could fund an ideal IT infrastructure. But despite that, you know, Uber grew up like every other organization optimizing for the delivery of their service or product and, and that doesn't entail optimizing for that infrastructure. So what they found, just like this hospital group with different definitions of diabetes, they found they happen to have grown up around service areas. So in this case cities, more or less. So when then the time came to do analysis -- we're just passing Super Bowl weekend, how will the Super Bowl affect the the supply of drivers or the demand from riders? They had to do it for the city of San Francisco, separate than the city of San Jose or the city of Oakland. They couldn't do the whole San Francisco Bay Area region, let alone the whole of the state or the whole of the country or what have you. And that repeated itself for every business question, every organizational question that they would want to have. This is the same in drug discovery. This is the same in patient care delivery or in billing. These operational questions are hard, shockingly hard.Eric Daimler: We had another one in logistics where we had a logistics company that had 100,000 employees. I didn't even know some of these companies could be so big, and they actually had a client with 100,000 employees. That client had 1000 ships, each one of which had 10,000 containers. And I didn't even know like how big these systems were really. I hadn't thought about it. But I mean, they're enormous. And the question was, hey, where's our personal protective equipment? Where is the PPE? And that's actually a hard question to ask. You know, we are thinking about maybe our FedEx tracking numbers from an Amazon order. But if you're looking at the PPE and where it is on a container or inside of a ship, you know, inside this large company, it's actually a hard question to ask. That's this question that all of these organizations have. Eric Daimler: In our case, Uber, where they they they had a friction in time and in money and in accuracy, asking every one of these business questions. They went then to find, how do I solve this problem? Do I use these old tools of ETL from the '80s? Do I use these more modern tools from the 2000s? They're called RDF or OWL? Or is there something else? They discovered that they needed a more foundational system, this categorical algebra that that's now expressing itself in smart contracts and quantum computers and other places. And they just then they found, oh, who are the leaders in the enterprise software expression of that math? And it's us. We happen to be 40 miles north of them. Which is fortunate. We worked with Uber to to solve that problem in bringing together their heterogeneous data infrastructure to solve their problems. And to have them tell it they save $10 million plus a year in in the efficiency and speed gains from the solution we helped provide for them.[musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: Let's pause the conversation for a minute to talk about one small but important thing you can do, to help keep the podcast going. And that's leave a rating and a review for the show on Apple Podcasts.All you have to do is open the Apple Podcasts app on your smartphone, search for The Harry Glorikian Show, and scroll down to the Ratings & Reviews section. Tap the stars to rate the show, and then tap the link that says Write a Review to leave your comments. It'll only take a minute, but you'll be doing a lot to help other listeners discover the show.And one more thing. If you like the interviews we do here on the show I know you'll like my new book, The Future You: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help You Get Healthier, Stress Less, and Live Longer.It's a friendly and accessible tour of all the ways today's information technologies are helping us diagnose diseases faster, treat them more precisely, and create personalized diet and exercise programs to prevent them in the first place.The book is now available in print and ebook formats. Just go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and search for The Future You by Harry Glorikian.And now, back to the show.[musical interlude]Harry Glorikian: So your website says that your software can map data sources to each other so that the perfect data model is discovered, not designed. And so what does that mean? I mean, does that imply that there's some machine learning or other form of artificial intelligence involved, sort of saying here are the right pieces to put together as opposed to let me design this just for you. I'm trying to piece it together.Eric Daimler: Yeah. You know, the way we might come at this is just reminding ourselves about the structure of artificial intelligence. You know, in the public discourse, we will often find news, I'm sure you can find it today, on deep learning. You know, whatever's going on in deep learning because it's sexy, it's fun. You know, DeepMind really made a name for themselves and got them acquired at a pretty valuation because of their their Hollywood-esque challenge to Go, and solving of that game. But that particular domain of AI, deep learning, deep neural nets is a itself just a subset of machine learning. I say just not not not to minimize it. It's a fantastically powerful algorithm. But but just to place it, it is a subset of machine learning. And then machine learning itself is a subset of artificial intelligence. That's a probabilistic subset. So we all know probabilities are, those are good and bad. Fine when the context is digital advertising, less fine when it's the safety of a commercial jet. There is another part of artificial intelligence called deterministic artificial intelligence. They often get expressed as expert systems. Those generally got a bad name with the the flops of the early '80s. Right. They flopped because of scale, by the way. And then the flops in the early 2000s and 2010s from IBM's ill fated Watson experiment, the promise did not meet the the reality.Eric Daimler: It's in that deterministic A.I. that that magic is to be found, especially when deployed in conjunction with the probabilistic AI. That's that's where really the future is. There's some people have a religious view of, oh, it's only going to be a probabilistic world but there's many people like myself and not to bring up fancy names, but Andrew Ng, who's a brilliant AI researcher and investor, who also also shares this view, that it's a mix of probabilistic and deterministic AI. What deterministic AI does is, to put it simply, it searches the landscape of all possible connections. Actually it's difference between bottoms up and tops down. So the traditional way of, well, say, integrating things is looking at, for example, that hospital network and saying, oh, wow, we have four definitions of diabetes. Let me go solve this problem and create the one that works for our hospital network. Well, then pretty soon you have five standards, right? That's the traditional way that that goes. That's what a top down looks that looks like.Eric Daimler: It's called a Golden Record often, and it rarely works because pretty soon what happens is the organizations will find again their own need for their own definition of diabetes. In most all cases, that's top down approach rarely works. The bottoms up approach says, Let's discover the connections between these and we'll discover the relationships. We don't discover it organically like we depend on people because it's deterministic. I, we, we discover it through a massive, you know, non intuitive in some cases, it's just kind of infeasible for us to explore a trillion connections. But what the AI does is it explores a factorial number actually is a technical, the technical equation for it, a factorial number of of possible paths that then determine the map of relationships between between entities. So imagine just discovering the US highway system. If you did that as a person, it's going to take a bit. If you had some infinitely fast crawlers that robot's discovering the highway system infinitely fast, remember, then that's a much more effective way of doing it that gives you some degree of power. That's the difference between bottoms up and tops down. That's the difference between deterministic, really, we might say, and probabilistic in some simple way.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, I'm a firm believer of the two coming together and again, I just look at them as like a box. I always tell people like, it's a box of tools. I need to know the problem, and then we can sort of reach in and pick out which set of tools that are going to come together to solve this issue, as opposed to this damn word called AI that everybody thinks is one thing that they're sort of throwing at the wall to solve a problem.Harry Glorikian: But you're trying to solve, I'm going to say, data interoperability. And on this show I've had a lot of people talk about interoperability in health care, which I actually believe is, you could break the system because things aren't working right or I can't see what I need to see across the two hospitals that I need information from. But you published an essay on Medium about Haven, the health care collaboration between Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway. Their goal was to use big data to guide patients to the best performing clinicians and the most affordable medicines. They originally were going to serve these first three founding companies. I think knowing the people that started it, their vision was bigger than that. There was a huge, you know, to-do when it came out. Fireworks and everything. Launched in 2018. They hired Atul Gawande, famous author, surgeon. But then Gawande left in 2020. And, you know, the company was sort of quietly, you know, pushed off into the sunset. Your essay argued that Haven likely failed due to data interoperability challenges. I mean. How so? What what specific challenges do you imagine Haven ran into?Eric Daimler: You know, it's funny, I say in the article very gently that I imagine this is what happened. And it's because I hedge it that that the Harvard Business Review said, "Oh, well, you're just guessing." Actually, I wasn't guessing. No, I know. I know the people that were doing it. I know the challenges there. But but I'm not going to quote them and get them in trouble. And, you know, they're not authorized to speak on it. So I perhaps was a little too modest in my framing of the conclusion. So this actually is what happened. What happens is in the same way that we had the difficulty with healthcare.gov, in the same way that I described these banks having difficulty. Heterogeneous databases don't like to talk to one another. In a variety of different ways. You know, the diabetes example is true, but it's just one of many, many, many, many, many, many cases of data just being collected differently for their own use. It can be as prosaic as first name, last name or "F.last name." Right? It's just that simple, you know? And how do I bring those together? Well, those are those are called entity resolutions. Those are somewhat straightforward, but not often 100 percent solvable. You know, this is just a pain. It's a pain. And, you know, so what what Haven gets into is they're saying, well, we're massive. We got like Uber, we got an effectively infinite balance sheet. We got some very smart people. We'll solve this problem. And, you know, this is some of the problem with getting ahead of yourself. You know, I won't call it arrogance, but getting ahead of yourself, is that, you think, oh, I'll just be able to solve that problem.Eric Daimler: You know, credit where credit is due to Uber, you know, they looked both deeper saying, oh, this can't be solved at the level of computer science. And they looked outside, which is often a really hard organizational exercise. That just didn't happen at Haven. They thought they thought they could they could solve it themselves and they just didn't. The databases, not only could they have had, did have, their own structure, but they also were stored in different formats or by different vendors. So you have an SAP database, you have an Oracle database. That's another layer of complication. And when I say that these these take $1,000,000 to connect, that's not $1,000,000 one way. It's actually $2 million if you want to connect it both ways. Right. And then when you start adding five, let alone 50, you take 50 factorial. That's a very big number already. You multiply that times a million and 6 to 12 months for each and a hundred or two hundred people each. And you just pretty soon it's an infeasible budget. It doesn't work. You know, the budget for us solving solving Uber's problem in the traditional way was something on the order of $2 trillion. You know, you do that. You know, we had a bank in the U.S. and the budget for their vision was was a couple of billion. Like, it doesn't work. Right. That's that's what happened Haven. They'll get around to it, but but they're slow, like all organizations, big organizations are. They'll get around to solving this at a deeper level. We hope that we will remain leaders in database integration when they finally realize that the solution is at a deeper level than their than the existing tools.Harry Glorikian: So I mean, this is not I mean, there's a lot of people trying to solve this problem. It's one of those areas where if we don't solve it, I don't think we're going to get health care to the next level, to sort of manage the information and manage people and get them what they need more efficiently and drive down costs.Eric Daimler: Yeah.Harry Glorikian: And I do believe that EMRs are. I don't want to call them junk. Maybe I'm going too far, but I really think that they you know, if you had decided that you were going to design something to manage patients, that is not the software you would have written to start. Hands down. Which I worry about because these places won't, they spent so much putting them in that trying to get them to rip them out and put something in that actually works is challenging. You guys were actually doing something in COVID-19, too, if I'm not mistaken. Well, how is that project going? I don't know if it's over, but what are you learning about COVID-19 and the capabilities of your software, let's say?Eric Daimler: Yeah. You know, this is an important point that for anybody that's ever used Excel, we know what it means to get frustrated enough to secretly hard code a cell, you know, not keeping a formula in a cell. Yeah, that's what happened in a lot of these systems. So we will continue with electronic medical records to to bring these together, but they will end up being fragile, besides slow and expensive to construct. They will end up being fragile, because they were at some point hardcoded. And how that gets expressed is that the next time some other database standard appears inside of that organization's ecosystem from an acquisition or a divestiture or a different technical standard, even emerging, and then the whole process starts all over again. You know, we just experience this with a large company that that spent $100 million in about five years. And then they came to us and like, yeah, we know it works now, but we know like a year from now we're going to have to say we're going to go through it again. And, it's not like, oh, we'll just have a marginal difference. No, it's again, that factorial issue, that one database connected to the other 50 that already exist, creates this same problem all over again at a couple of orders of magnitude. So what we discover is these systems, these systems in the organization, they will continue to exist.Eric Daimler: These fragile systems will continue to exist. They'll continue to scale. They'll continue to grow in different parts of the life sciences domain, whether it's for clinicians, whether it's for operations, whether it's for drug discovery. Those will continue to exist. They'll continue to expand, and they will begin to approach the type of compositional systems that I'm describing from quantum computers or Minecraft or smart contracts, where you then need the the discovery and math that Conexus expresses in software for databases. When you need that is when you then need to prove the efficacy or otherwise demonstrate the lack of fragility or the integrity of the semantics. Conexus can with, it's a law of nature and it's in math, with 100 percent accuracy, prove the integrity of a database integration. And that matters in high consequence context when you're doing something as critical as drug side effects for different populations. We don't want your data to be misinterpreted. You can't afford lives to be lost or you can't, in regulation, you can't afford data to be leaking. That's where you'll ultimately need the categorical algebra. You'll need a provable compositional system. You can continue to construct these ones that will begin to approach compositionality, but when you need the math is when you need to prove it for either the high consequence context of lives, of money or related to that, of regulation.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, well, I keep telling my kids, make sure you're proficient in math because you're going to be using it for the rest of your life and finance. I always remind them about finance because I think both go together. But you've got a new book coming out. It's called "The Future is Formal" and not tuxedo like formal, but like you're, using the word formal. And I think you have a very specific meaning in mind. And I do want you to talk about, but I think what you're referring to is how we want automated systems to behave, meaning everything from advertising algorithms to self-driving trucks. And you can tell me if that my assumption is correct or not.Eric Daimler: Though it's a great segue, actually, from the math. You know, what I'm trying to do is bring in people that are not programmers or research technology, information technology researchers day to day into the conversation around automated digital systems. That's my motivation. And my motivation is, powered by the belief that we will bring out the best of the technology with more people engaged. And with more people engaged, we have a chance to embrace it and not resist it. You know, my greatest fear, I will say, selfishly, is that we come up with technology that people just reject, they just veto it because they don't understand it as a citizen. That also presents a danger because I think that companies' commercial expressions naturally will grow towards where their technology is needed. So this is actually to some extent a threat to Western security relative to Chinese competition, that we embrace the technology in the way that we want it to be expressed in our society. So trying to bring people into this conversation, even if they're not programmers, the connection to math is that there are 18 million computer programmers in the world. We don't need 18 million and one, you know. But what we do need is we do need people to be thinking, I say in a formal way, but also just be thinking about the values that are going to be represented in these digital infrastructures.Eric Daimler: You know, somewhere as a society, we will have to have a conversation with ourselves to determine the car driving to the crosswalk, braking or rolling or slowing or stopping completely. And then who's liable if it doesn't? Is it the driver or is it the manufacturer? Is it the the programmer that somehow put a bug in their code? You know, we're entering an age where we're going to start experiencing what some person calls double bugs. There's the bug in maybe one's expression in code. This often could be the semantics. Or in English. Like your English doesn't make sense. Right? Right. Or or was it actually an error in your thinking? You know, did you leave a gap in your thinking? This is often where where some of the bugs in Ethereum and smart contracts have been expressed where, you know, there's an old programming rule where you don't want to say something equals true. You always want to be saying true equals something. If you get if you do the former, not the latter, you can have to actually create bugs that can create security breaches.Eric Daimler: Just a small little error in thinking. That's not an error in semantics. That level of thinking, you don't need to know calculus for, or category theory for that matter. You just need to be thinking in a formal way. You know, often, often lawyers, accountants, engineers, you know, anybody with scientific training can, can more quickly get this idea, where those that are educated in liberal arts can contribute is in reminding themselves of the broader context that wants to be expressed, because often engineers can be overly reductionist. So there's really a there's a push and pull or, you know, an interplay between those two sensibilities that then we want to express in rules. Then that's ultimately what I mean by formal, formal rules. Tell me exactly what you mean. Tell me exactly how that is going to work. You know, physicians would understand this when they think about drug effects and drug side effects. They know exactly what it's going to be supposed to be doing, you know, with some degree of probability. But they can be very clear, very clear about it. It's that clear thinking that all of us will need to exercise as we think about the development and deployment of modern automated digital systems.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, you know, it's funny because that's the other thing I tell people, like when they say, What should my kid take? I'm like, have him take a, you know, basic programming, not because they're going to do it for a living, but they'll understand how this thing is structured and they can get wrap their mind around how it is. And, you know, I see how my nephew thinks who's from the computer science world and how I think, and sometimes, you know, it's funny watching him think. Or one of the CTOs of one of our companies how he looks at the world. And I'm like you. You got to back up a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Right. And so it's the two of us coming together that make more magic than one or the other by themselves.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, I want to jump back sort of to the different roles you've had in your career. Like like you said, you've been a technology investor, a serial startup founder, a university professor, an academic administrator, an entrepreneur, a management instructor, Presidential Innovation Fellow. I don't think I've missed anything, but I may have. You're also a speaker, a commentator, an author. Which one of those is most rewarding?Eric Daimler: Oh, that's an interesting question. Which one of those is most rewarding? I'm not sure. I find it to be rewarding with my friends and family. So it's rewarding to be with people. I find that to be rewarding in those particular expressions. My motivation is to be, you know, just bringing people in to have a conversation about what we want our world to look like, to the degree to which the technologies that I work with every day are closer to the dystopia of Hollywood narratives or closer to our hopes around the utopia that's possible, that where this is in that spectrum is up to us in our conversation around what these things want to look like. We have some glimpses of both extremes, but I'd like people, and I find it to be rewarding, to just be helping facilitate the helping catalyze that conversation. So the catalyst of that conversation and whatever form it takes is where I enjoy being.Harry Glorikian: Yeah, because I was thinking about like, you know, what can, what can you do as an individual that shapes the future. Does any of these roles stand out as more impactful than others, let's say?Eric Daimler: I think the future is in this notion of composability. I feel strongly about that and I want to enroll people into this paradigm as a framework from which to see many of the activities going around us. Why have NFTs come on the public, in the public media, so quickly? Why does crypto, cryptocurrency capture our imagination? Those And TikTok and the metaverse. And those are all expressions of this quick reconfiguration of patterns in different contexts that themselves are going to become easier and easier to express. The future is going to be owned by people that that take the special knowledge that they've acquired and then put it into short business expressions. I'm going to call them rules that then can be recontextualized and redeployed. This is my version of, or my abstraction of what people call the the future being just all TikTok. It's not literally that we're all going to be doing short dance videos. It's that TikTok is is an expression of people creating short bits of content and then having those be reconfigured and redistributed. That can be in medicine or clinical practice or in drugs, but it can be in any range of expertise, expertise or knowledge. And what's changed? What's changed and what is changing is the different technologies that are being brought to bear to capture that knowledge so that it can be scalable, so it can be compositional. Yeah, that's what's changing. That's what's going to be changing over the next 10 to 20 years. The more you study that, I think the better off we will be. And I'd say, you know, for my way of thinking about math, you might say the more math, the better. But if I were to choose for my children, I would say I would replace trig and geometry and even calculus, some people would be happy to know, with categorical algebra, category theory and with probability and statistics. So I would replace calculus, which I think is really the math of the 20th century, with something more appropriate to our digital age, which is categorical algebra.Harry Glorikian: I will tell my son because I'm sure he'll be very excited to to if I told him that not calculus, but he's not going to be happy when I say go to this other area, because I think he'd like to get out of it altogether.Eric Daimler: It's easier than calculus. Yeah.Harry Glorikian: So, you know, it was great having you on the show. I feel like we could talk for another hour on all these different aspects. You know, I'm hoping that your company is truly successful and that you help us solve this interoperability problem, which is, I've been I've been talking about it forever. It seems like I feel like, you know, the last 15 or 20 years. And I still worry if we're any closer to solving that problem, but I'm hopeful, and I wish you great success on the launch of your new book. It sounds exciting. I'm going to have to get myself a copy.Eric Daimler: Thank you very much. It's been fun. It's good to be with you.Harry Glorikian: Thank you.Harry Glorikian: That's it for this week's episode. You can find a full transcript of this episode as well as the full archive of episodes of The Harry Glorikian Show and MoneyBall Medicine at our website. Just go to glorikian.com and click on the tab Podcasts.I'd like to thank our listeners for boosting The Harry Glorikian Show into the top three percent of global podcasts.If you want to be sure to get every new episode of the show automatically, be sure to open Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player and hit follow or subscribe. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And we always love to hear from listeners on Twitter, where you can find me at hglorikian.Thanks for listening, stay healthy, and be sure to tune in two weeks from now for our next interview.

You don't have to work decades for the federal government to have an impact. That's one idea behind the Presidential Innovation Fellows program … operated by the General Services Administration. Now the program has a new director. Rebeca Lamadrid joined the Federal Drive.

Our guest is Nick Sinai, Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth software companies. Before joining Insight in 2014, Nick served in the White House, where he was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer. At the White House, Nick led President Obama’s Open Data Initiatives and helped start and grow the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings entrepreneurs, innovators, and technologists into government.  Nick is a senior fellow and former adjunct faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a technology and innovation in government field class. Nick is also an advisor to Coding It Forward, a nonprofit that places computer science, data science, and design students in federal agencies.

Our guest is Nick Sinai, Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth software companies. Before joining Insight in 2014, Nick served in the White House, where he was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer. At the White House, Nick led President Obama's Open Data Initiatives and helped start and grow the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings entrepreneurs, innovators, and technologists into government.  Nick is a senior fellow and former adjunct faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a technology and innovation in government field class. Nick is also an advisor to Coding It Forward, a nonprofit that places computer science, data science, and design students in federal agencies.

Alongside distinguished speakers Nick Sinai and Dr. John Elder, host Christina Ho explores questions about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to help businesses and government agencies solve complex and challenging problems. Nick Sinai is a Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, a leading global venture capital and private equity firm . Nick joined Insight in 2014 from the White House, where he was U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Among many accomplishments, he led President Obama's Open Data Initiatives and helped start and grow the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings entrepreneurs, innovators, and technologists into government. Nick is also a senior fellow and former adjunct faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. John Elder founded Elder Research, a data science consulting firm with a 25-year history of leadership in machine learning and AI solutions. He invented some breakthrough techniques and co-authored 3 books on advanced analytics, 2 of which received book-of-the-year awards. John also served for 5 years on a panel appointed by President Bush to guide technology for National Security.

They're smart. They're idealistic. They want to help. But they've only got a year. They're the latest class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, nearly three dozen technology practitioners and entrepreneurs just assigned to agencies across the government to help with modernizing and deploying new digital services. Joining the Federal Drive with more about the program, its executive director Josh Di Frances.

Take a leap, say "yes" and change your life! Good For Others Host John Valencia and special guest Kara DeFrias talk about finding the courage to say "yes" to life opportunities can lead to ultimate contentment. From the theatre, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and even to the White House as an Obama Presidential Fellow, learn how Kara's decision to say "yes" in times of uncertainty has transformed her life and made it a fun, creative, and meaningful journey. Kara DeFrias' background is a mix of private and public sector experience, including Director of UX for Vice President Biden at the White House. She's currently Chief of Staff for QuickBooks Online Platform at Intuit. Prior, Kara spent 4 years at TurboTax and received an appointment to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows. In the latter, she served as an entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between the government and the people from a technology perspective. She was senior advisor to 18F's executive team, TEDxIntuit founder, and Oscars and Super Bowl staff.Kara does pro-bono digital strategy for the likes of Team Rubicon; spent ten days in rural India teaching micro-entrepreneur women human-centered design; and guest lectures at the University of California San Diego STEM Academy for high school girls. She graduated summa cum laude from Penn State with a master's in instructional design and was a finalist for San Diego Woman of the Year. Check out more of Kara's work on her website

Kara's background is a mix of private and public sector experience, including Chief of Staff for the QuickBooks Online Platform at Intuit and Director of Experience Design in the Obama White House. In the former, she champions small businesses, solopreneurs, and freelancers around the globe. Prior, Kara received an appointment to the first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, where she served as entrepreneur in residence, reimagining the relationship between the federal government and the people from a technology perspective. She was also Chief of Staff at 18F, TEDxIntuit founder, and worked on TurboTax, Oscars, and Super Bowl.   Kara does pro-bono digital strategy for the likes of Team Rubicon; spent 10 days in rural India teaching micro-entrepreneur women human centered design; and guest lectures at Stanford, George Washington University, and UC San Diego STEM Academy for high school girls. She graduated summa cum laude from Penn State with a masters in instructional design, and was San Diego Woman of the Year finalist. Twitter: https://twitter.com/karadefrias Website: https://www.karadefrias.com/.  

I loved chatting to Kara back in August, excited to finally get this episode out to your ears! Kara started her career as an instructional designer, eventually working her way to leading user experience design through experience at (amongst others) top-flight companies in sport (the Super Bowl), Film (Oscars) and politics, both as senior advisor to 18F and as Biden's Director of UX during Obama's cancer moonshot. She was also one of the first Presidential Innovation Fellows. We talked about Instructional design, meeting Obama, pale males, career progression of a person vs a professional and where you can use existing skills in new ways and readjust your career to suit the things you’re good at AND the things you love. We also covered attempting to cure cancer, doing user-centred design in government, being a good sponsor and our mutual love of the West Wing. Show links Obama announcing the cancer moonshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W2Fl_X_6I4 Kara's article on how to care and feed a team: https://medium.com/@karadefrias/the-product-managers-guide-to-the-care-and-feeding-of-humans-ee2854bc5944 Find Kara on the web at https://www.karadefrias.com/, and on twitter at https://twitter.com/karadefrias. Who else should we be speaking to? We have a fantastic set of interviews already recorded so we're sorted for getting into your ear-holes for this year, but we're looking for guests for 2020 episodes, so if you or someone you know is doing great work, let us know! Even better if it's someone who might not be regulars on other podcasts or stages. Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Deliveroo! Our wonderful sponsor Deliveroo is looking for loads of designers, researchers, writers as well as leaders and managers. It really is an exciting and fun place to work (I should know as an alumni). Go check out the team, blog and open roles at deliveroo.design or follow them on twitter: https://twitter.com/deliveroodesign

Joshua Di Frances, executive director of White House Presidential Innovation Fellows at GSA, details what the latest group is working on, and the traits that make for a good fellow. Kim Weaver, director of External Affairs at the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, discusses the Thrift Savings Plans new withdrawal options, and how they’re seeing use. Danny Werfel, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, and Robert Shea, principal at Grant Thornton Public Sector, discuss the role of the President’s Management Agenda and lasting implementations made by prior presidencies.

They arrive. They work in a federal agency for a couple of years. And they return to the private sector. But they leave the government changed for the better. They're the Presidential Innovation Fellows. The latest cohort of 20 fellows was just ushered in. For an update on the program, we turn to its executive director, Josh Di Frances.

Sponsors React Native Radio iPhreaks Show Ruby Rogues Cachefly Panel Eric Berry Richard Littauer Joined By Special Guest: Bastien Guerry Episode Summary Bastien Guerry is employed by the French Administration in a program named Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général inspired by Presidential Innovation Fellows. He is also the Release Manager of Org Mode, an information management and outlining tool for Emacs. Bastien wrote his first software for his girlfriend to help her with her thesis. He then went onto maintain Org Mode between years 2011 and 2015. Bastien likens open source software maintainers' job to that of stay-at-home mothers' job description, as both are a lot of work and involve a lot of responsibility and stress and both are not compensated financially. The panel then ask about the evolution of Fund The Code Project which supports the free software movement by donations from sponsors. Bastien invites free software maintainers to contact Fund The Code Project for help in finding sponsors. Links Bastien Guerry - EmacsWiki Org mode _DINSIC Etalab Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général Presidential Innovation Fellows https://bzg.fr/en/donating-to-free-software-and-free-culture.html/ https://libraries.io/ https://backyourstack.com/ http://themaintainers.org/ Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) | Twitter Maintainers III: Practice, Policy and Care https://publiccode.net/ https://www.fundthecode.org/ http://openmodels.fr/en/ SOS 005: Trademark Versus Copyright to Sustain OSS with Mehdi Medjaoui Open Source & Software Development | O'Reilly OSCON Picks Eric Berry: Software Freedom Conservancy Richard Littauer: The Internet is a City https://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Anarchism-Noam/dp/1904859208 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_and_Company_(bookstore) Bastien Guerry: https://www.writethedocs.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Cardenio

Sponsors React Native Radio iPhreaks Show Ruby Rogues Cachefly Panel Eric Berry Richard Littauer Joined By Special Guest: Bastien Guerry Episode Summary Bastien Guerry is employed by the French Administration in a program named Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général inspired by Presidential Innovation Fellows. He is also the Release Manager of Org Mode, an information management and outlining tool for Emacs. Bastien wrote his first software for his girlfriend to help her with her thesis. He then went onto maintain Org Mode between years 2011 and 2015. Bastien likens open source software maintainers' job to that of stay-at-home mothers' job description, as both are a lot of work and involve a lot of responsibility and stress and both are not compensated financially. The panel then ask about the evolution of Fund The Code Project which supports the free software movement by donations from sponsors. Bastien invites free software maintainers to contact Fund The Code Project for help in finding sponsors. Links Bastien Guerry - EmacsWiki Org mode _DINSIC Etalab Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général Presidential Innovation Fellows https://bzg.fr/en/donating-to-free-software-and-free-culture.html/ https://libraries.io/ https://backyourstack.com/ http://themaintainers.org/ Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) | Twitter Maintainers III: Practice, Policy and Care https://publiccode.net/ https://www.fundthecode.org/ http://openmodels.fr/en/ SOS 005: Trademark Versus Copyright to Sustain OSS with Mehdi Medjaoui Open Source & Software Development | O'Reilly OSCON Picks Eric Berry: Software Freedom Conservancy Richard Littauer: The Internet is a City https://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Anarchism-Noam/dp/1904859208 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_and_Company_(bookstore) Bastien Guerry: https://www.writethedocs.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Cardenio

Sponsors React Native Radio iPhreaks Show Ruby Rogues Cachefly Panel Eric Berry Richard Littauer Joined By Special Guest: Bastien Guerry Episode Summary Bastien Guerry is employed by the French Administration in a program named Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général inspired by Presidential Innovation Fellows. He is also the Release Manager of Org Mode, an information management and outlining tool for Emacs. Bastien wrote his first software for his girlfriend to help her with her thesis. He then went onto maintain Org Mode between years 2011 and 2015. Bastien likens open source software maintainers' job to that of stay-at-home mothers' job description, as both are a lot of work and involve a lot of responsibility and stress and both are not compensated financially. The panel then ask about the evolution of Fund The Code Project which supports the free software movement by donations from sponsors. Bastien invites free software maintainers to contact Fund The Code Project for help in finding sponsors. Links Bastien Guerry - EmacsWiki Org mode _DINSIC Etalab Entrepreneurs d'intérêt général Presidential Innovation Fellows https://bzg.fr/en/donating-to-free-software-and-free-culture.html/ https://libraries.io/ https://backyourstack.com/ http://themaintainers.org/ Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) | Twitter Maintainers III: Practice, Policy and Care https://publiccode.net/ https://www.fundthecode.org/ http://openmodels.fr/en/ SOS 005: Trademark Versus Copyright to Sustain OSS with Mehdi Medjaoui Open Source & Software Development | O'Reilly OSCON Picks Eric Berry: Software Freedom Conservancy Richard Littauer: The Internet is a City https://www.amazon.com/Chomsky-Anarchism-Noam/dp/1904859208 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_and_Company_(bookstore) Bastien Guerry: https://www.writethedocs.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Cardenio Special Guest: Bastien Guerry.

About the Lecture: This lecture will focus on the background of the build up to the 2014 - 2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and what the United States Government did to respond to this epidemic. Steven VanRoekel will discuss how the US tackled the challenges from the epidemic and what the government learned from it. About the Speaker: Steven VanRoekel is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City. Prior to this role, Steve was a technology and innovation consultant for the Foundation, seeking to further its mission through the use of data, technology and innovation. Steven began his engagement with Rockefeller in the Fall of 2017. Steve is a maker, investor and philanthropist. Prior to Rockefeller, Steve was in the Obama Administration where he last served as Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). At USAID, Steve helped coordinate the Administration's response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, including coordinating efforts to clarify and systemize the collection of data from the field and led the maker efforts to redesign the Ebola protective suit. Prior to his role at USAID, Steven was the second Chief Information Officer of the United States, appointed by President Obama in 2011. At the White House as U.S. CIO, Steve led the creation of the PortfolioStat agency review process, launched the “FedRAMP” cloud computing program, co-founded the United States Digital Service and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, and led the U.S. Government's Open Data and Mobile policies. Wired Magazine named Steve one of the world's top 10 influencers of cloud computing. Concurrently, Steve spent a year as the acting Deputy Director for Management/Chief Operating Officer for the U.S. Before joining the White House, Steve held two prior positions in the Obama Administration at USAID and the Federal Communications Commission. Prior to the Administration, Steve's entire professional career was at Microsoft Corporation where he held many roles, including the longest-serving Business and Strategy Assistant to Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. His final role at Microsoft was as Senior Director of the Windows Server and Tools Division of Microsoft – a division, that at his departure, had risen to the be the second largest revenue generator for Microsoft. Steve is on the board of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, the board of the Maret School of Washington D.C., and is on the board of VetSports, a nonprofit that helps veterans with opportunities to reintegrate into their communities through sports, community Service, events, and partnership. Steve, his wife Carrie, and three daughters (age 12, 10 and 8) live in Washington, DC.

We're in North America talking to Lena Trudeau, co-founder and CEO of Nuage Cloud Strategies, formerly of the Canadian Digital Service in Ottawa and 18F in Washington DC. A passionate public sector leader, Lena has served many tours of duty in government technology, and also spent time at Amazon Web Services growing cloud adoption within government. We chat to Lena about her long career in public service, including at the Presidential Innovation Fellows program in the White House, and how she went on to establish a digital delivery culture in the US government with 18F. We learn why she believes international public servants are a national asset, how the tech world can do better with diversity, and hear her thoughts on empathetic and human-centred leadership models. Lena also tells us why she loves Canadian cultural values, and educates us on the fast-paced world of ice hockey. We get her top bourbon recommendations in preparation for the regular Friday afternoon OneTeamGov celebration!

Travis Moore, Founder of TechCongress (non-profit startup), describes how he and his team are creating a way for those interested to apply their tech skills to government. TechCongress is a year long fellowship, where fellows get the chance to work with members of Congress and leverage their technical skills to influence policy and legislation. Some of the areas that Travis touches upon in this episode include: 1. What is TechCongress 2. Examples of projects TechCongress fellows work on 3. Why Travis started TechCongress 4. What a typical day looks like - from drafting statements in response to events (such as the Equifax breach), to working on longer term policy changes 5. How this program is great for those looking to understand how govt and policy making works 6. Future paths that Fellows end up taking 7. Other programs like this - Presidential Innovation Fellows, but there are very few that exist 8. Skills you pick up during the program - How Congress works, nuances of how coalitions form, negotiations, bill writing, policy research, etc. 9. Skills a good fellow needs to have - technical ability, tech translation skills, people skills and teamwork 10. Application timelines 11. Interview Process Thank you for listening!! Follow the show on Twitter @LED_Curator Website www.learneducatediscover.com/ Like us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/learneducatediscover/ Email us at hello@learneducatediscover. We will reply!! Subscribe to the show on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/learn…ver/id1049159321

John Paul Farmer, Microsoft's Director of Technology and Civic Innovation, stops by to discuss the last day of the Obama administration, and his mission to cement the Presidential Innovation Fellows via the Talent Act.