Lester Bird Email & Phone Number

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Member of the new Civil Justice Innovation Project focused on finding and implementing solutions to assist states and jurisdictions with their civil legal systems. The project works to make the nation’s civil legal system more accessible and affordable to the public by implementing the most promising technologies and tools to assist self-represented litigants and improve state court efficiency. As the technical assistance lead for portals, my role is to work with tech partners including Microsoft, legal organizations including Legal Services Corportation and Pro Bono Net, social service organizations like 211, and state partners including courts and legal aid organizations to make legal information easier to find online. Most of my time is focused on the Legal Navigator portal built by Microsoft (launching 2019) which uses natural language processing to help users enter potential legal issues in their own terms; navigate through standardized triage interviews to diagnose their legal need and next legal step in a process; and connect users to both legal and non-legal resources to help them with their issue. This work requires the blending of iterative, agile tech culture and the need to serve users with the correct information to help them with their legal need. My role helps drive data standardization efforts and work to find the right long-term solution to ensure project sustainability and growth.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Member of the Voting Information Project (VIP) team at Pew managing technical relationships with Google and Democracy Works as well as outreach to state partners. In 2016, the Voting Information Project saw more than 120 million lookups of voting information (polling place, ballot, and/or election administration information). The Voting Information Project was founded in 2008 in an attempt to help people find out where to vote on Election Day. It evolved over the years to include early vote, vote by mail, election administration data, and ballot information. In 2016, my work ranged from interfacing with local clerks to get polling place data in a standardized format to working with the Google Civic Information API team to keep them up to speed on what data to expect and when. This role also saw me oversea our election night results reporting efforts which attempted to create a sustainable revenue stream for VIP. Through this, I became familiar with data standardization efforts around election night results including the NIST 1500-100 spec and Open Civic Data Identifiers (OCD-IDs).I also participated in the spinoff process for VIP which spanned more than eighteen months as we looked to find the project a home where it could continue to grow. In June 2018, Pew spunoff all aspects of VIP to Democracy Works to continue the work of helping people answer the questions of where is my polling place and who is on my ballot.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

Co-Founder of Erase the Line which won a Knight Foundation Prototype Fund Award for helping election officials develop data-driven strategies to alleviate lines on Election Day.