Mark Headd is a writer, speaker, teacher and thought leader on civic technology and open government. Self taught in programming, he has been developing web, telephone, speech recognition and messaging applications for over 10 years. He joined Accela, Inc. as Technical Evangelist to build a developer community around the Accela Civic Platform – bringing value to the company’s customers, partners and clients. Previously, Mark served as the City of Philadelphia’s first Chief Data Officer, to lead the city’s open data and government transparency initiatives.