About
Inspiration
In 2019 Kathy Pham and Emily Tavoulareas were reflecting on the oversimplified, and often technology-centered narratives about the start of the United States Digital Service. They had a shared sense that (1) the complex realities of the origins of the United States Digital Service were not well represented and (2) the full story — that precedes and follows the healthcare.gov launch failure and rescue — is valuable to practitioners, researchers, scholars of government, and all storytellers seeking to learn from or replicate the approach.
With an enthusiastic nudge from Erie Meyer, the two set out to capture the story through conversations with those who were directly involved. So over six years, three pregnancies, a global pandemic, late nights and early mornings across several geographic locations, this oral history came to life as a labor of love.
Scope
This is an independent project that documents a specific part of the history of the United States Digital Service: its origins and initial founding.
For the purposes of this phase of the project, the Origins is scoped as January 2009 – January 2015 which spans the seeds, the crisis, and the launch of the US Digital Service on August 11, 2014. Over 40 people were interviewed. Additionally, the first leads of the Communities of Practice and some of the first heads of Agency digital service teams where also interviewed.
The Curators
Kathy Pham served as a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service (USDS) at The White House, where her service spanned the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations.
Kathy is a Fellow and Faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School where she created and teaches Product Management and Society; co-founded the Ethical Tech Working Group; and co-founded ai-in-the-loop as part of the Ethics and Governance of AI fellowship. She also co-founded Mozilla’s Responsible Computing and Mozilla Builders, now Ventures. She served as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Product and Engineering at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committee. In industry, Kathy has held various roles across product and engineering. She is a proud double graduate of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Emily Tavoulareas co-founded the first agency-level team of the U.S. Digital Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and served as Senior Policy Advisor to the US Chief Technology Officer at the White House. She is the Founder of the Civic Tech Memory Bank, a forthcoming oral history project documenting the multi-decade history of the civic tech movement in the United States.
Emily is an adjunct professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she is focused on technology and public policy. She serves on the Steering Committee of Data & Society’s Public Tech Leadership Collaborative—a peer learning collective of scholars, researchers, and government leaders committed to addressing the social and cultural implications of data and technology. Emily was recently the inaugural Managing Chair at Georgetown’s Tech & Society, where she helped build an engaged ecosystem of scholars, practitioners, and students that crossed disciplines and created novel opportunities for learning and collaboration.