Joining us from Washington DC is Sean Herron. Sean is a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House working on Open Data Initiatives with the Food and Drug Administration. Sean is a digital strategist, web developer, and policy expert dedicated to creating easier ways for citizens to interact with their government. Most recently, he served as a Strategist in the Open Innovation office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where he spearheaded open data and open source initiatives for the agency. Sean is responsible for one of the first deployed WordPress instances in the U.S. Government, openNASA, and frequently works with other agencies to advise on best practices for WordPress security, community building, and open source participation. He has a passion for web standards and responsive design and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Public Policy from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

His presentation will be “WordPress as a Platform: Empowering Civic Change through Code”.

The growth of WordPress across the internet has brought phenomenal change in the way organizations are able to interact with their audiences. Beyond simple website generation, the flexibility of WordPress as a CMS has enabled governments and civic groups to rapidly create tools used by millions of citizens to better understand and interact with their communities. Discover how organizations like NASA and the White House are using WordPress to catalog and share open data, offer electronic services, and solicit feedback from citizen, and learn best practices in security, usability, and performance when designing WordPress platforms designed to scale to millions of users.