Beeck Center Office Hours
CfA Summit: Reserve time with a public interest tech expert!
Meet Public Interest Tech (PIT) Experts: Beeck Center Office Hours @ CfA Summit
Need a little advice on a project? Want to talk shop with brilliant folks? Ask questions and get topic area advice from Beeck experts. It's a professional networking opportunity, so bring a small agenda and check out the fellow's work through their Beeck Center bio (linked within their profile below).
Quick Guide to CfA Office Hours:
- Read through Beeck Center profiles below, see their office hours topic areas in fellows' profiles.
- Select the fellow(s) you'd like to meet with.
- Click on the "Schedule with" link below the fellow's photo. Select a time available on their calendar.
Once you've scheduled with the fellow, you'll both be sent a calendar invitation to meet up with a link to a video call platform.
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, step out of a CfA Summit session, and chat with a brilliant member of the Beeck Center team!
About the Beeck Center
Working alongside experts and students, we surface, accelerate, and scale promising
interventions to fill market, policy, or structural gaps that may impede faster positive
We are an experiential hub with two key mandates.
Through Georgetown University, we operate as an orchestrating broker across sectors to increase the probability of scaled positive impact, ultimately provoking grassroot and institutional leaders to think, behave, and collaborate differently toward a shared vision of prosperity for all.
We believe that accelerating social change hinges on all sectors operating in concert. We take promising, impact-ripe efforts that fill ecosystem gaps and ready them for scale. Our experiential work always includes students as our long-game, to actively ready future leaders in the evolving impact space.
Beeck Center Fellows Attending Code for America Summit, 2021
Katya Abazajian
Katya is working to make data and technology more effective tools for advocacy and reform toward better local democracies.
Katya's Office Hour Topic Areas:
- City data for impact -- Helping technologists use imperfect, incomplete, or limited local data to solve big, sticky problems.
- Inclusion & community partnerships -- Improving collaboration methods to make community members a center of design, development, and implementation of innovation projects.
- Collective data governance -- Strategies for equitably governing data through data commons, collaboratives, cooperatives
Taylor Campbell
Taylor Campbell (she/her/hers) is a resourceful and relatable leader whose goal is to always support effective and inclusive public service. She knows how to transform organizational cultures and improve operational efficiency, using creative strategy, digital technology, and data governance.
- Strategic program design,
- Training and technical assistance,
- Internal systems/operations
Waldo Jaquith, Beeck Center Fellow, State Data Collaborative
Waldo Jaquith is a technologist with extensive experience in the government, non-profit, and for-profit sectors.
Waldo's Office Hours Topic Areas:
- Collaborative intergovernmental software development: How government agencies can team up to build custom software to solve their common needs.
- Custom software procurement: How government agencies can change their procurement practices to make success far more likely.
- Legislative budgeting for major software projects: How and why legislatures need to budget and perform oversight differently in order to make it possible for agencies to succeed.
Lorelei Kelly
Lorelei Kelly is an expert on building inclusive and informed democratic systems. She leads the Resilient Democracy Coalition (RDC) and is based at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University. The coalition assesses how data, technology and new engagement methods can help build a more resilient democracy, specifically focused on Congress.
Lorelei Office Hour Topics:
- Democracy support
- Digital + data in Congress
- Democratic process as critical infrastructure
Ariel Kennan
Ariel Kennan is a leader in service design, digital product development, and organizational strategy. She embeds equity and justice in her work and strives to create a world where everyone can prosper. As a Senior Fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, she is leading the Infrastructure for Opportunity portfolio to establish core building blocks needed to operate and govern our institutions to better serve residents and improve outcomes in society.
Ariel's Office Hours Topics:
- Safety net: services to lift residents out of poverty and create economic opportunity
- Digital service modernization: rebuilding & creating new modern digital services
- Service design: designing with the people who use and deliver services
Tyler Kleykamp
Tyler Kleykamp (pronounced CLAY – CAMP) was the State of Connecticut’s first Chief Data Officer (CDO) and one of the first state Chief Data Officers in the nation.
Tyler's Office Hours Topics:
- State level data - Tyler focuses on improving and expanding responsible use of data in state government
- Open Data - Expanding access to a and utility of state level open data
- Data integration and analytics - Integrating data across programs and services can be complicated, we focus on effective strategies to share and analyze data across various programs (happy to workshop these)
Jenn Noinaj
Jenn Noinaj is a social impact strategist, researcher, and designer passionate about creating products and services that are inclusive for all.
Jenn's Office Hours Topics:
- PIT Hiring - How to improve the PIT pipeline
- PIT Onboarding - How to bring people onto teams and enable them to do their best
- PIT Supporting - How to create inclusive cultures on PIT teams
Happy to talk about design, technology, and leadership / coaching / career development as well!
Vandhana Ravi
Vandhana works as the Program Associate for the Beeck Center’s data for social good portfolio.
Vandhana's Office Hours Topics:
- Technology + Critical Identity Theory: How can we reimagine how we teach/learn/use technology?
- Abolition through Public Interest Technology: How can we reduce institutional/systemic harm through PIT? How can we build life-affirming public system interactions?
Sarah Scott Rodriguez
About Sarah
Sarah Rodriguez is a researcher for the Data + Digital portfolio at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center. As a researcher she documents the work being done on the ground by local digital services teams. In addition to her work at the Beeck Center, Sarah is a designer and technologist for the City of Austin, where she works on the equity implications of technology for the city’s Re-imaging Public Safety initiative.
Sarah's Office Hours Topics
- Technology and equity, specifically looking at how technology can mask, replicate, and create harm.
- Anti-racist design looking at how to decolonize design.
Sarah Schacht
Sarah has over 15 years experience in the civic technology, open data, open government, and public interest technology fields. She is experienced in coordinating PIT and open data projects in public health. At Beeck, she is working to build new and equitable programs to expand the PIT workforce pipeline.
Sarah's Office Hours Topics:
- COVID-19 data at county and state public health levels
- Data standards & public health.
- Public Interest Technology workforce needs and strategies
Sara Sorka
Sara Soka is an advocate for human-centered policy, implementation, and service design.
Sara's Office Hour Topic:
- Social Safety Net Benefits - Where and how human-centered design, ethical data use, and other uses of technology are making benefit delivery easier in states/municipalities across the US.
Emily Tavoulareas
Emily uses design and technology to make things—products, experiences, programs, policies, organizations—work better for people.
Emily's Office Hours Topics:
- Teaching digital fundamentals to policy students
- Creating pathways/opportunities to pull in civic technologists into curricula to teach in various formats.