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ShaperTalk on Innovation + Politics: Jay Nath

On November 21, the San Francisco Global Shapers hosted Jay Nath for a ShaperTalk at WeWork.

As the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer for San Francisco and White House Champion of Change, Jay Nath works with the tech community and the public to help make government more effective, efficient, and responsive. Jay applies modern, agile thinking to government administration, focusing on “lean government” as a platform for innovation. Under his leadership, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation launched the first of its kind Startup in Residence program in collaboration with the White House, offering an on-premises incubator at City Hall, meant to apply startup ingenuity directly to pain points within government itself. In partnership with GSA, Nath launched Superpublic the first of its kind collaboration space for government.

Inspired by the Presidential Innovation Fellows, Nath created the Mayor’s Senior Fellowship program where cross-sector leaders spend one year in City Hall working on high impact projects. He also established the nation’s first open source software policy for a city government and authored open data legislation that requires City departments to make nearly all non-confidential datasets available to the public, mandates department-level data coordinators, and creates a chief data officer position for the city. Prior to public service, Nath worked at a San Francisco startup as a VP of Product and at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a senior consultant.