Civic Innovations

Mark Headd is the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia, serving as one of the first municipal Chief Data Officers in the United States. He currently works as a government technology strategist for Ad Hoc, LLC

Mark has almost 20 years of combined experience working in federal, state and local government in the U.S, including one of the largest states in the nation and one of the largest cities. His work experience spans both the executive and legislative branches of government – he has worked as a policy advisor, a budget and tax analyst and as a government technology executive.

Before joining the City of Philadelphia, Mark served as the chief policy and budget advisor for the State of Delaware’s Department of Technology and Information. He has also served as Director of the Delaware Government Information Center, as a technology adviser to former Delaware Governor Thomas R. Carper, and in the New York State Senate as a budget and finance analyst. While serving in the General Service Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), he helped pioneer 18F’s work with state and local governments, and helped establish 18F’s National Security and Intelligence Portfolio, serving as its first Director. He also led customer success efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.

Mark has worked as a software developer for technology companies from the Delaware Valley to Silicon Valley building solutions that are used by state and local governments across the country. He also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and continues to work closely with the organization on open government and civic technology projects around the country.

Self-taught in technology and software development, he holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is a former adjunct instructor at the University of Delaware where he taught a course in electronic government in the School of Public Policy and Administration, and is a former instructor at Wilmington University where he taught a course in government finance.

Mark writes often about technology and civic innovation for the 18F blog, Government Technology, Huffington Post, Civicist, the Code for America Blog, GovFresh and on his personal blog, Civic Innovations. He is also the author of the open source book: How to Talk to Civic Hackers.

He says things on Twitter and Mastodon