Catherine Bracy
Civic Hacker
Oakland, CA
TOPICS
Democracy
Policy
Race
Social Media
Technology
Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer working at the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the Co-founder & CEO of the TechEquity Collaborative, an organization that mobilizes tech workers and companies to advocate for economic equity in our communities.
Previously, she served as Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and EcosystemDirector of Community Organizing, where she grew Code for America’s Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in 80+ cities across the US. Before that, she was Director of the Obama campaign’s technology field office in San Francisco, the first-of-its-kind in American political history. There, she organized technologists to volunteer their skills to the campaign’s tech and digital efforts. Prior to joining the campaign, she was the administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, ran the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, and now serves on the board of directors of the Data & Society Research Institute and the Terner Housing Lab.
Catherine publicly challenged Silicon Valley on its homogeneity long before the first Google buses zoomed into the headlines and argued that Benjamin Franklin was the first hacker in her super popular TED talk. Let’s just say, she’s got a brain and she’s not afraid to use it. Audiences leave smarter and they leave provoked when Catherine is around.
Hacking is a deeply democratic activity.
Community organizing is a set of tactics that can galvanize individuals into a collective power, and that's essentially what the internet is for; individuals in the aggregate have power.
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