TED Newsmakers: Samantha Power to become ambassador to the UN, Jennifer Pahlka joins White House staff

News Samantha Power (left) and Jennifer Pahlka (right) speak at TED2008 and TED2012, respectively.

Today, Barack Obama will be naming a new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations – and sources say that it will be Samantha Power, outspoken anti-genocide official and TED2008 speaker. Power is expected to replace Susan Rice, who sources say will be named national security advisor.

Samantha Power on a complicated heroPower is a fascinating choice for this very important role. She’s been a longtime aide to Obama; when the president established an Atrocities Prevention Board in 2012, he named Power as its chair. Power also served as the National Security Staff’s Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights from the beginning of Obama’s term through February 2013, when she left to spend time with her husband and two small children. A statement at the time said she was “likely to return to the administration.”

Power’s TED Talk gives us the feeling that she will deeply embrace her role as UN ambassador. At TED2008, she spoke with intense passion about the rise of the anti-genocide movement in the United States in recent years. She also tells the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil, a UN diplomat for 34 years who was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2003. Listen as she tells the story of how he tiptoed across difficult moral lines to save lives in the world’s most broken places, and the lessons she learned from his career.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Pahlka — founder and executive director of Code for America and a TED2012 speaker – announced big news of her own. She is joining the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, serving as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation for the a year.Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a better government In a blog post, she writes that she’s taking the role for two reasons –  to help the government embrace technological innovations, and to gain a deeper understanding of what it’s like to work inside government for when she returns to Code for America.

We’ll be closely watching what Pahlka does in this new role. In her TED Talk, she asks people who’ve given up on government to give their withdrawal a closer look. “Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society,” Pahlka says. “And there’s a generation out there that’s grown up on the Internet, and they know that it’s not that hard to do things together – you just have to architect the systems the right way.”

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Possum problems and building better government: Jennifer Pahlka at TED2012

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, an organization she describes as being like Peace Corps for geeks, “only instead of sending people to the third world, we send them to the wilds of City Hall.”

The fellows’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to show government what’s possible via technology. She shows a picture of a fire hydrant in Boston that was only rarely dug out when it snowed. One of the Code for America volunteers built an app to let people commit to digging out a fire hydrant. It’s only a small product, she acknowledges, yet its impact has been viral. Someone in Honolulu has adapted the app to care for tsunami sirens; Seattle has adopted it to get people to clear storm drains; Chicago is using it to get people to sign up to clear sidewalks when it snows. Nine cities have signed up: the app’s influence has spread organically and without friction. And that’s not normally how it goes in government. She mentions another project helping parents get their kids into the right public school. In the real world, she was told that would have taken two years and cost $2 million. The Code for America fellow cranked it out in 2.5 months.

Yet the main theme of Pahlka’s talk is not to talk about apps. Those are just the start. Instead, she implores the audience to engage with government, not give up on it. Sure, we can be frustrated, but we can’t give up. “Government is about doing together what we can’t do alone.” And government, too, is how we tackle people’s possum problems. What on earth does she mean? Simple. She means someone who calls a city helpline to report a possum in a trash can. In Boston, someone posted just that problem to the app Citizens Connect. A neighbor saw the post and responded: “Located trash can. Possum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned the trash can on its side. Walked home. Good night, sweet possum.” As Pahlka describes it, it’s a great example of digital meeting physical–and of government getting in on crowdsourcing. And that’s how we should think of government, as a platform to connect people and thereby strengthen communities.

“We have to make bureaucracy sexy,” she says to an admittedly lone whoop from the audience. Instead of despising bureaucracy and government, we should consider how we interact with an institution that, after all, acts on all our behalves. “We can’t do without government, but we do need it to be more effective.” Inspired by the way in which Code for America fellows have applied themselves, she sees the apps they are creating as “little digital reminders that we’re not just consumers of government. We’re more than that. We’re citizens.” And she closes with a provocative question: “When it comes to the big important things we need to do together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices or a crowd of hands?”

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