NextGov: America's digital infrastructure belongs to you

Jessie Mahr and Kameron Kerger co-wrote an Op-Ed in Next Govt: America's digital infrastructure belongs to you, in collaboration with Katie Hoeberling, Michelle Cheripka, Jonathan Gilmour and Matt Price.

Government tools and datasets belong to you. American tax dollars funded the data collection, the tool development and the work of the agency staff who used their skills and experience to develop the policies and programs that tools delivered. The broad accessibility of these tools has helped inform governance decisions at federal, state and local levels. We use this data to make sense of the land we live on, the air we breathe, the water we drink. We use weather information to plan our daily commutes and weekend plans and climate data to predict storms, floods and wildfires. For the government to remove this information is to steal from us. And not just the data itself, but every choice we could have made with it.

Read the Op-Ed
Jessie Mahr

Jessie is the Director of Technology at EPIC. Prior to joining EPIC, she led business development and strategy for Upstream Tech, a technology start-up that uses satellite imagery to monitor and evaluate natural resources. She has also worked on programs related to regional planning for wetlands restoration and urban climate change resilience for the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration and Stantec. Jessie holds a Master of Science in Water Resource Engineering and Environmental Policy from Tufts University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography from The University of Texas.

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