WASHINGTON –When Katie Jacobs Stanton moved to the nation’s capital after working in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, it was difficult for her to break the habits she learned while working at Yahoo and Google.
“One of the organizational things you do at Google is create your OKRs, which stand for objectives and key results,” Stanton said. “I’ve been doing them since I entered government, even though no one else does them.”
Luckily, Stanton had a list of OKRs ready when she became the new special advisor in the Office of Innovation at the State Department in January 2010.
“During my first meeting with [State Department Chief of Staff] Cheryl Mills, I went in and talked to her about my OKRs,” Stanton said. “As we were talking, Secretary Clinton walked in and it was the first time ever in my life I was glad I did my OKRs.”
Her role is to create new digital media platforms to help Clinton meet her diplomatic and development goals.
“We want to use modern day tools to solve modern day problems,” Stanton said.
Text HAITI
Only a week into her new job, an earthquake struck in Haiti and Stanton hit the ground running.
“With every crisis, there is opportunity,” she said.
Within hours of the quake, Stanton called the CEO of Mobile Accords and asked to use its’ mobile network to create a platform for Americans to donate. Mobile Accords set up a short code so Americans could text HAITI to 90999 and $10 would be donated to the American Red Cross.
“We had no idea what to expect,” Stanton said. “We thought we would make $100,000 at max.”
A week later, the campaign raised $32 million, making it the biggest mobile donation campaign ever.
“It was a great example of what government can do.”
She also persuaded Haiti’s mobile operators to assign a temporary short-code emergency number — 4636 — so anyone in Haiti could text in their needs and that information would be passed on to responders.
“We saw on television these stories of people trapped under the buildings using a mobile phone to tell people where they were, and they were saved,” Stanton said. “So we thought, we should have this for everybody and we set this up.”
Sudan Vote Monitor
Coming off the success of her initiatives in Haiti, Stanton worked to apply a similar mobile template to solve other global issues.
During the elections in Sudan, Stanton helped create a mobile platform to cut down on election fraud. Working with mobile operators and citizen groups in Sudan, she helped launch SudanVoteMonitor.com, a system where voters could text 4500 or 4545 to report instances of election fraud.
“Election monitors or citizens can text in any election-related problems: missing ballots, polls closing too early, acts of voter intimidation,” Stanton said. “We want this to be a free and fair election.” She says the State Department will work to launch similar initiatives for other elections abroad.
Mexico’s neighborhood tip line
Stanton is also piloting an effort to help prevent further acts of violence in Mexico. She is working with operators and groups in Mexico to set up an anonymous neighborhood tip line, where citizens can text in reports of violence or criminal activity anonymously. That data would then be sent to emergency responders and police.
“We’ve seen this unprecedented rise of violence in that area,” Stanton said. “This is an effort to make the whole process more transparent.”
She says the State Department will also work to launch the program in Colombia.
“It’s possible to solve these problems using technology, but also using the power of our communities. When we see people just working together, using simple but powerful technology, we can save the world.”
Her Path to Power
Stanton grew up in Peekskill, N.Y. The daughter of a nurse and a banker, she decided to pursue her interest in politics. She graduated from Rhodes College with a degree in political science and got her master’s in International Affairs at Columbia University. While at Colombia, she worked as a Jacob K. Javits fellow for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. However, the experience wasn’t what she expected, so she set her sights on Silicon Valley.
After working at Chase as an Associate in the Corporate Emerging Markets group, Stanton moved to Yahoo. While at Yahoo, she worked as a product manager and helped build Yahoo Finance. She then moved over to competing search engine, Google, in 2003.
She began working for the Google search team but soon moved over to the New Business Development team where she helped launch innovative Google products. She helped develop Google Finance in 2006, which made searching for finance news more accessible and interactive. She also launched Open Social, a tool that helps developers build social networking applications that can run on multiple sites.
The Road to the White House
Yet, it was her involvement in launching Google Moderator that put Stanton on the radar of the Obama administration. Google Moderator is a crowd-sourcing product that allows users to submit and rank questions. The product became a useful tool during the elections, where citizens could submit questions for the Presidential debates. Soon after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Stanton was asked to join the administration as the very first Director of Citizen Participation.
“When the president calls, you have to come,” Stanton said. “I wasn’t really looking to leave Google but I thought if the White House calls I would definitely do it, so here I am.”
Her role was to create platforms to help the new administration connect with citizens.
“We made it easier for the government to communicate with and back and forth to our citizens.”
She helped administer the terms of service between Twitter and all federal departments in an effort to get administration officials to join the social networking site.
“The president on his first day signed a memorandum of openness and transparency and participation and he means it,” said Stanton. “From the very top all the way downwards, we need to make sure that we are being very open with the American people about what we are doing. We need to be accountable.”
In January 2010, Stanton joined Alec Ross in the Office of Innovation at the State Department.
She says if she does her job well, she hopes the need for an Office of Innovation won’t be necessary in the future.
“We want to make ourselves obsolete and this position obsolete,” Stanton said. “We want everyone to be doing something that’s innovative.”