federal AI Sandbox & chat launches out of 10x 🚀🚢
2024, Nationwide
10x built and shipped a federally-compliant, enterprise-ready fork of the popular, fast-moving open source AI interface open-webui, in less than 200 hours. We delivered stability and security improvements, a gov-compliant CI/CD pipeline, as well as feature improvements to enable rapid prototyping and validation of government AI use cases by mixed teams of program/policy/tech/compliance experts in a friendly, no-code environment. 10x is also adapting and improving open source tooling for continuous improvement and monitoring of guardrails and model output quality to enable new AI products to meet federal AI compliance standards. These tools will enable the government to benefit fully from rapid advances in AI product offerings without becoming “locked-in” to a small number of vendors that prioritize government compliance. The initial enterprise roll out begins at GSA in January 2025.
Notify.gov pilot launches out of 10x 🚀
2022, Nationwide
US Notify, a federal government technology platform that helps US agencies overcome privacy and compliance barriers to communicating with the public via SMS and email, has launched from TTS’s 10x accelerator. The platform is designed to address government barriers to adoption of commercial tools for critical comms channels, particularly SMS. Over the course of four months, Jim led a engineering team that took US Notify from an investment pitch to a pilotable shared service prototype for the federal government, facing 2+ million internal customers. Jim served as lead engineer/manager, assembled the team, and evaluated candidate open source technologies. Ultimately, the excellent work done by the UK Government Digital Service allowed the team to leap-frog into high-value, real-world testing within weeks. Notify launched into open beta in 2023 and is live at beta.notify.gov.
Impactive’s mobile app white-labeled as Vote Joe for the Biden Campaign 🎉
2019-20, Nationwide
Impactive recently scored a big win. Our technology platform was white-labeled as the Vote Joe app and was the centerpiece of the Biden Campaign’s 50-state, $100,000,000+ digital organizing campaign, providing mission-critical digital services to millions of people for both the 2019 primary and 2020 general campaigns. Our platform became especially relevant during the unprecedented challenge of getting out the vote during a pandemic. The Impactive-branded version of our app and platform was used by wide-range of both partisan and non-partisan NGOs, including Vote.org, VoteAmerica, Planned Parenthood, and presidential primary candidates, including current vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Largest-ever study of friend-to-friend voter mobilization
2018-20, Cambridge
During the midterm election cycle in 2018, as Head of Product at Impactive, Jim was responsible for the experimental design of a randomized controlled trial with tens of thousands of participants testing the effectiveness of the Impactive platform’s core premise of voter mobilization via digital messages from friends and acquaintances. Impactive later convened a team of data scientists from Columbia University to co-author a scientific paper based on the data collected. The strength of results demonstrated in the paper led directly to winning multiple bids for presidential campaign contracts the following year.
Impactive Accepted to Y-Combinator!
2018, San Francisco
The tech startup that Jim co-founded Impactive (formerly known as Outvote) in late 2017 was accepted into YC’s summer 2018 batch. The company was founded to translate frontier academic research on digital friend-to-friend civic behavior modification into an mobile organizing platform that would enable the next generation of non-profits and political campaigns. As a technical Head of Product, he led product design and research, regularly contributed code to the mobile platform, and wore the customary multitude of other hats for a team that arrived at YC with a headcount of three.
Harvard Kennedy School consulting for City of Boston
2018, Boston
Jim was the technical member of a five person consulting team from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government alongside former US Deputy CTO Nick Sinai, and USDS founders Brian Lefler and Stephanie T. Nguyen. The project team helped the City of Boston re-evaluate its procurement strategy in the context of redesigning its public records request technology stack. They left the city with a documented, user- and outcome-centered (rather than process- and feature-centered) procurement framework that has been utilized ever since.
A video of a pair of hands manipulating a piece of fabric in front of a laptop screen which is representing the shape of the fabric as the hands manipulate it
Smart material for Wyss Institute at HARVARD
2016, Cambridge
As a special project for Martin Bechtold and Joanna Aizenberg of the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering, Jim invented a novel piezoresistive fabric which is capable of transmitting its shape in high-fidelity via bluetooth using fully-woven sensors. He also wrote the analytical software, which uses a dynamic bayesian network to produce accurate, very-low-latency shape prediction from noisy signals.
Big Data for Social Good keynote talk at HVG Smart Data Conference
2016, Budapest
Fulbright OpenLab Civic Tech Workshop Series
2015, Budapest
As a Fulbright Fellow, Jim founded OpenLab Public Design Lab, a space for civic tech prototyping in collaboration with FabLab Budapest and Central European University. OpenLab is a small, flexible, digital fabrication space operating out of FabLab Budapest in Budapest, Hungary. OpenLab connects the civil society community with technologists, academic researchers and students in a space that focuses on fostering civic, technological and cultural development through rapid prototyping and hands-on technology education.
Enterprise tech transformation at SEIU
2009-14, Portland, Denver, Washington DC
Jim helped a complex bureaucracy, operating in a highly-regulated environment, transform its approach to technology. He was responsible for convening senior leadership stakeholders to identify gaps in the current technology portfolio and strategy, ultimately leading to the organization’s first in-house engineering effort, consisting of a multi-year overhaul of the organization’s core financial and membership management data systems. He led a cross-functional team with full responsibility for planning, budget, risk management, architecture design, user research and engineering management across the entire software development life cycle. The new data system increased gross revenue by 8% in its first year and was later adopted by locals in other parts of the country.