http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/tech-savvy-rachel-sterne/#1
漂亮 + 厲害 + Stylish ！
被譽為美國的 Kate Middleton
P.S. 好漂亮的 黑發，直發。
In late August, while millions of New Yorkers rode out Hurricane Irene with bottled water, flashlights, and transistor radios, Rachel Sterne, the Bloomberg administration’s 28-year-old chief digital officer, was hunkered down in City Hall with a MacBook Pro, a BlackBerry, and an iPhone. As wind and rain lashed the five boroughs, Sterne was involved in a real-time experiment in how a municipal government networks with its citizens during a natural disaster. It involved coordinating the city’s use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Crowdmap, and its own Web site and data mine to send out alerts (“Stay indoors”), provide maps with citizen-submitted photos and reports (downed trees, power outages), and answer questions spreading through the digital sphere (No, Rikers Island is not in an evacuation zone; yes, you can take your pets to shelters). “It was a really exciting case study of how technology can exponentially increase our reach during an emergency,” Sterne says. “I could totally nerd out talking about it forever.”
Mayor Bloomberg named Sterne the city’s head nerd back in January, making New York the only U.S. metropolis with a chief digital officer, joining London and inspiring Rio de Janeiro to follow suit. “Right now, our society—the way that we get information, consume culture, have relationships—is being disrupted, which is just a trendy way of saying ‘completely transformed,’ ” she says. “And if we want government to stay relevant, we need to harness the technologies that are changing the way people live.” The news of Sterne’s appointment caused an online frenzy and instantly transformed her from a well-liked, well-connected member of the New York digerati with a short but impressive résumé—founder of her own citizen-journalism site; TED Talks and Aspen Institute pundit; adjunct professor at Columbia Business School—into the face of a new era in digital governance.
Caroline McCarthy, a former tech reporter who now works for Google, remembers meeting Sterne for the first time at an informal monthly New York tech meetup in 2007. “There I was in jeans and a hoodie, probably with greasy hair, like everybody else,” McCarthy recalls. “And when I saw Rachel, I thought, What is this incredibly articulate, impeccably dressed, gorgeous young woman doing at a start-up-pitch event?”
With her willowy, six-foot frame, Sterne cuts a striking figure in any setting, whether she’s gathering ideas about how to improve the city’s Web interface from a dude-heavy crowd of digital activists at an Open NY Forum, speaking on a panel about “We Government” at NYU, trying to explain her job to guests at a Gracie Mansion reception, or catching up with friends from the start-up and new-media scene at a rooftop party thrown by David Karp, the 25-year-old founder of Tumblr.
“We were looking for someone with the sensibility of an entrepreneur and a passion for making a difference,” says Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, who hired Sterne. “But also someone who was really plugged into the tech community. An ambassador between that world and ours.”
Like McCarthy, Sterne is part of a new generation of bright, attractive women who are turning Silicon Alley into less of a boys’ club. It’s a group that includes her good friend Soraya Darabi, a cofounder of the social-dining app Foodspotting; Brooke Moreland and Ashley Granata, the cofounders of Fashism, a social-shopping site and smartphone app that lets users crowdsource opinions about their outfits by uploading pictures of themselves for comment (Moreland got the idea while trying on clothes at Uniqlo and wishing she had someone to ask for advice); and Rachel Sklar, an online journalist, and Emily Gannett, an event planner, who together have started an informal organization called Change the Ratio, dedicated to raising the profile of women in technology.
“There’s a lot of generosity in the tech space—people genuinely want to help each other succeed—but it’s still incredibly important for women to support each other,” Sterne says. “I’ve been really lucky and gotten tremendous support, and now I find myself trying to do the same thing.” Apparently she has. Moreland and Granata cite Sterne’s generosity. “It’s weird to say that someone who is younger than you is a role model,” Moreland, who is 30, says. “But Rachel is.”
“She’s an intellectual heavyweight who’s as smart as—or smarter than—any guy in the room,” Sklar says. “And she’s ambitious, but she’s also really nice and gracious and poised. She’s a lady.” Half-joking, she adds, “She’s kind of our Kate Middleton.”
Sterne grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, but spent her early years in Brooklyn and has always been in love with New York City. She worked on her first Mac when she was seven, built her first Web site at thirteen (“basically a bunch of links to fashion and other stuff I thought seemed cool”), and was raised with an equal respect for capitalist innovation and public service. During her years as a history major at NYU, she spent a summer in France as an au pair, volunteered on a Native American reservation in Montana, interned for then New York City District 1 Councilman Alan Gerson, and, along with the rest of her generation, discovered Facebook. After a postgraduate internship with the State Department and a stint at LimeWire, Sterne began building ties within the tech-start-up community—and looking for her big idea.
That idea turned out to be GroundReport, a citizen-journalism site that provided a platform for anyone with a cell phone and a Wi-Fi connection to report a breaking story. “Rachel was really quite a visionary because there were very few people at the time who understood what citizen-generated media was or could become,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Sterne ran GroundReport from 2006 to 2010, and though it generated more buzz than cash (a major newspaper came close to buying it but ultimately backed off), it did establish her as a new-media player by the time she was 25.
Sterne lives in Greenwich Village with her fiancé, Max Haot, the 34-year-old Belgian cofounder and CEO of Livestream, a wildly popular service that allows anyone with a video camera to stream content live over the Internet. Haot and Sterne have found themselves on lists of New York media power couples, though their synergy has thus far been more personal than professional. Haot says that he would love for her to someday mastermind digital strategy for his company, but he concedes, “I probably can’t afford her.”
For the moment, Sterne is happy to leave the private sector behind for a job where, she says, “the bottom line is making people’s lives better.” She spent her first 90 days putting together a 68-page report called “Road Map for the Digital City,” which Mayor Bloomberg unveiled at a press conference last May with Sterne, towering over him in her flats, at his side. Right now, about four million people a month log on to the city’s Web site, find their way to one of its social-media accounts, receive e-mail updates, or fire up one of its smartphone apps to pay a water bill, submit a geo-tagged photo of a pothole to 311, find an affordable apartment, or—every New Yorker’s dream—complain to the mayor and have him respond on YouTube. The specifics of the Road Map fall under the category of cool rather than revolutionary: Wi-Fi in the parks, a “hackathon” to revamp the city’s Web site, and using Foursquare to alert restaurant-goers about health-code violations. But its underlying vision of “open government” is potentially transformative. “Our challenge is, How can we put even more power into the hands of citizens?” Sterne says. “How can we give them the resources to solve their own problems and meet their own needs?”
Sterne shares Bloomberg’s vision of turning New York into a tech hub that rivals Silicon Valley, but she understands that it won’t happen by opening factories that make computer chips. What matters now, she says, is the code—the digital language—that is quickly becoming the foundation of the city’s financial and cultural infrastructure. “Rachel is part of the generation that understands that code is literally the architecture of the future,” Rasiej says. “Code can solve problems, save money, make money, and advance humanity.
“She isn’t entering this job walking into a headwind,” he adds. “She’s got a hurricane at her back.”
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