David Recordon (born September 4, 1986) is an American technologist with an open standards and open source background. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Rebellion Defense. From January 2021 to September 2022, he served as the Director of Technology in the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...

under U.S. President Joe Biden. He previously served in a similar role during the last two years of the presidency of Barack Obama. Between his roles in government, he worked as Vice President of Infrastructure and Security at the

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifet ...

. Earlier in his career, he played an important role in the development and evangelism for

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...

and

OAuth OAuth (short for "Open Authorization") is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. T ...

Biography

Born in Portland,

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. T ...

, Recordon began working with open source software and open standards in high school, including working for

LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, a ...

. At age 19, he played an important role in the development and popularization of

and

, and is probably best known for his evangelism on behalf of the decentralized single-sign-on protocol. In 2007, he became the youngest recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award. Recordon was employed as an Open Platforms Tech Lead at

blogging A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

company

Six Apart Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox (the blogging platform). The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is he ...

and more recently as a

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

Engineering Director. In March 2015, Recordon was appointed to the newly created position of Director of White House Information Technology by President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

. Through this role, he drove major technology modernization efforts touching nearly every aspect of the White House. Following the end of the Obama administration, Recordon was hired as Vice President of Infrastructure and Security at the

and resided in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. In the run-up to the 2020 United States presidential election, Recordon volunteered as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the

Presidential transition of Joe Biden The presidential transition of Joe Biden began on November 7, 2020 and ended on January 20, 2021. Unlike previous presidential transitions, which normally take place during the roughly 10-week period between the election in the first week o ...

, and, on January 5, 2021, Recordon was named as the Director of Technology in the White House Office of Management and Administration for the incoming administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President

Kamala Harris Kamala Devi Harris ( ; born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th vice president of the United States. She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well ...

. In this role, he drove massive modernization of classified systems in partnership with the DoD and the IC.

References

, - , - 1986 births Living people American bloggers Web developers Computer programmers Technology evangelists Writers from Portland, Oregon {{US-compu-bio-stub