Mar 24th, 2009 |
Jennifer Pahlka“What We Do In Government Matters”: My Interview with Carolyn Lawson in honor of Ada Lovelace Day
Recently, my colleague David Berlind introduced me to Carolyn Lawson, the CIO of California’s Public Utilities Commission. For a couple of months now, I’ve been working not just on Web 2.0 Expo, but on a new set of events the TechWeb/O’Reilly team will produce focused on the use of Web 2.0 in government, and David was excited to connect me with someone with a passion for public service, great insight into the challenges of government and technology, and an extra helping of leadership savvy.
Over lunch (for which we needed separate checks, since government employees can’t take freebies for anything over a couple of bucks), I asked Carolyn about her thoughts on the potential for the principles and technologies of Web 2.0 to transform government (and recruited her to speak at Web 2.0 Expo). As she gracefully articulated the challenges and the potential, I began to get a sense of a woman who has risen to a position of authority and power not because of her passion for technology (though she is clearly an expert), but because of her dedication to people: both the teams she leads and the public she serves. When she talked about what drives her – a firm belief that she serves the public good, that citizens rely on her teams’ systems for their safety and well-being, that her work helps people survive in a harsh world – I got shivers down my spine. And I knew that I had found the person I should profile for Ada Lovelace Day.
What is Ada Lovelace Day? It is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology, named in honor of one of the first computer programmers. A few months ago, Web 2.0 Expo Europe speaker, social software consultant, and inspiration in her own right Suw Charman-Anderson published the following on PledgeBank.com:
“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if1,000 other people will do the same.”
What a great idea, Suw. Here’s my interview with Carolyn:
How did you get started in technology?
Out of self-defense. I was an administrative assistant at a brokerage firm; our office was in Northern California and the main office was in Southern California, and the network would constantly go down. I’d call the guys in SoCal and they’d say “what did you do?” It got tiring. So I went to Borders and bought a book on NT 3.5 and read it. I did it to avoid them, to avoid always calling for help.
