Megan Winfield has been named the new chief technology officer at USAFacts, the nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization started by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide data-driven context on everything from the economy to immigration to crime.
Winfield is relocating to Bellevue, Wash., from Lexington, Ky. She’s been the CTO of Campspot, the platform that helps campers find destinations, for almost three years. Prior to that she was senior director of software engineering and digital for Hilton, the global hospitality company, where she spent more than seven years.
As CTO, Winfield will lead USAFacts’ engineering organization and sit on the leadership team, helping to ensure that tech decisions align with strategy and mission at the nonprofit.
Winfield is intrigued by the problems that USAFacts is trying to solve for the American public, and the technical challenge of tackling it all.
“Access to data is everything right now,” she told GeekWire. “I feel like transparency, non-biased data, is such a critical part of something that a lot of different parts of the public are hungry for at the moment.”
She also sees an inflection point with AI and the tools that are available now to handle large data sets and parse those into something useful.
USAFacts was started in 2017 by Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team. It employees about 47 people and is led by President Poppy MacDonald, who previously led Politico.
The site draws on information from 100 government databases and regularly crunches numbers in an effort to take the pulse and track trends in America — without the noise and bias that overwhelms so many Americans who regularly turn to cable news or social media.
Winfield said she considers herself a civically involved person who has personally experienced the frustration of not having transparency and useful data.
“I think it’s a really key time to be thinking about a truly unbiased source of data and really making sure that people understand that that’s what USAFacts represents,” Winfield said.
Related:
- Steve Ballmer brings his facts in a deep dive on government policy with ‘Daily Show’s’ Jon Stewart
- Steve Ballmer launches ‘Just the Facts’ video series to better inform American voters on key issues
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