Recordon has worked as Facebook’s Engineering director since 2005, but will now join the White House as the Director of Information Technology. According to a statement, his role is to “ensure that the technology utilized by the White House is efficient, effective, and secure.” He will spearhead efforts to merge overlapping systems and update government software, while improving its security, writes Alyssa Bereznak for Yahoo.
From Silicon Valley to the White House
The appointment of Facebook’s Recordon is the latest move from the government designed to develop a dedicated tech staff. Last year the U.S. Digital Service was launched, with ex-Google engineer Mikey Dickerson at its head. Dickerson was crucial in rescuing HealthCare.gov after its terrible launch in 2013.
Dickerson and Recordon make up part of a growing number of government techies who developed in Silicon Valley. Megan Smith, once of Google, became Chief Technology Officer of the Digital Service, while former Twitter lawyer Alexander Macgillivray became her deputy.
After studying information technology and criminal justice at University of Rochester’s Institute of Technology, Recordon worked for various startups such as VeriSign and Six Apart. His dedication to open-source coding won him the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2007, and he is a known advocate of OpenID, a technology which enables users to log in to various websites using the same ID.
Moving on from Facebook
During his time at Facebook he worked on internal productivity tools for the company’s human resources, video conferencing and security sections, as well as supervising open source and engineering education projects.
A previous visit to the White House in March 2014 provided hints at Recordon’s increasing involvement with the U.S. Digital Service. He wrote a Facebook post claiming that the “the United States government serves all of us in ways the venture capital fueled valley does not” before underlining his commitment to “finding ways to help these teams learn how to build high-quality technology.”
Despite stating that he was not considering moving to D.C. in the post, it seems Recordon has now changed his mind, and is happy to swap Facebook for a new adventure as part of the White House’s growing U.S. Digital Service.
