Jay Nath

In his current role as the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer, Jay Nath is working with the tech community and the public to help reinvent government in the digital age. As part of this effort, a partnership announced in 2012 with Code For America’s Civic Accelerator will help open the doors of government to our tech community to drive new solutions and spin off new businesses. If you have ideas for innovating San Francisco government send him a tweet.

Mr. Nath joined the City & County of San Francisco in September 2006 as Director of CRM where he successfully deployed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software enterprise-wide. The technology plays a critical role in managing over 10 million phone calls through SF 311.  In 2007, he established the City’s first Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployment which serves as a real-time bi-directional communication hub managing millions of messages. In his role as Director of Innovation for the Department of Technology he led an effort to make San Francisco the first large city in the nation to use Twitter as a new channel for taking public requests. This idea soon led to an effort to establish an international standard for 311 services allowing interoperability with third-party applications. As a result there are now dozens of apps available and many more in the pipeline. He is now focused on growing the adoption of Open311 which has over 40 cities internationally and dozens of vendors onboard.

In 2010, Jay Nath established the nation’s first open source software policy for city government, and in the same year authored Open Data Legislation requiring City departments to make all non-confidential datasets under their authority available on DataSF.org, the city’s one stop web site for government data. Mr. Nath launched DataSF in August 2009 using open source technology taking only three months from idea to go-live. The initial phase of DataSF includes nearly 200 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency. More than 60 software applications have already been created from the City’s data and are featured in the DataSF App Showcase. This includes San Francisco Crimespotting, an interactive crime map, EcoFinder, an iPhone app that helps residents recycle, and Routesy, an app that helps people find their way around the Bay Area’s transit systems.

The Open Source and Open Data policy are part of a larger Open Gov initiative being led by Jay Nath for the City and County of San Francisco to engage constituents, focused on open data, open participation and open source.

Prior to working for the City, Jay Nath worked at SquareTrade, an internet company in San Francisco where we was a senior product manager. Previously he was a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers where he started his career after graduating from Cornell. He lives with his wife, Christine, and two cats in San Francisco’s Sunset District. His interests are biking (in the slow lane), vegetarian cooking and general geekery.