Alfano, McDougall win seats on Code for America National Advisory Council

The winners are in for Code for America’s National Advisory Council — a brain trust in charge of guiding the work done by the network of civic-hacking brigades — and Philly snagged representation at both the at-large and regional levels

Chris Alfano, Jarvus Innovation CTO, was elected alongside four others as an At-Large member of the council, after some 700 votes were tallied. Dawn McDougall, the executive director of Code for Philly who ran for both At-Large and regional seats, was elected to represent the Northeast region.

“It’s incredibly humbling,” McDougall said of the announcement. “To be honored with this leadership and responsibility to a national network of roughly 50,000 volunteers is nothing short of awe-inspiring.”

The technologist said she aims to help define the role the NAC will play in the broader network of local technologists, which are organized in local brigades. Sharing knowledge across brigades and guiding the community to better diversity and inclusion practices are also on McDougall’s to-do list.

Congrats to everyone elected to the @codeforamerica NAC! Awesome choices #cfabrigade community! Special props to our own @de_mcdougs & @themightychris! We know youse are gonna rep us well! https://t.co/eX1jO4qky5

— Code for Philly (@CodeForPhilly) February 13, 2018

Alfano, who outlined his priorities on this Medium post, said his priorities for the seat remain focused in modernizing the infrastructure behind public interest applications.

“In short, my priorities are to advocate for Free Software in the infrastructure of our movement and build a national ‘civic cloud’ team that can liberate the fruits of our work from hegemon hosting credits and the need to track down original developers to keep public contributions online,” Alfano said.