Leigh Heyman is the former Director of New Media Technologies for the

Obama White House Barack Obama's tenure as the List of presidents of the United States, 44th president of the United States began with First inauguration of Barack Obama, his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. Obama, a Democra ...

, where he served from 2011 to 2015, and a retired U.S. National Team

coxswain The coxswain ( or ) is the person in charge of a boat, particularly its navigation and steering. The etymology of the word gives a literal meaning of "boat servant" since it comes from ''cock'', referring to the wiktionary:cockboat, cockboat, a ...

. Prior to serving in the Obama administration, Heyman ran the technology infrastructure for

Blue State Digital Blue State Digital is an adtech that specializes in online fundraising, and campaign consultancy. The company was founded by 4 former staffers of the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign. The company became notable after providing digital stra ...

, a digital political consulting firm for Democratic clients, including the

Democratic National Committee The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the principal executive leadership board of the United States's Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party. According to the party charter, it has "general responsibility for the affairs of the ...

and the Barack Obama presidential campaign. At MySQLConf 09, Heyman stated that his team managed the technology platform for the winning campaign. In 2011, he joined the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...

digital team. At the White House, Heyman focused on supporting the digital program for President Obama, focusing largely on

Whitehouse.gov whitehouse.gov or wh.gov is the official website of the White House and is managed by the Office of Digital Strategy of the White House Office under the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It was launched in 1994 by the ...

leveraging open source technology like

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

to launch

We the People The Preamble to the United States Constitution, beginning with the words We the People, is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution's fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Courts have referred to it as reliable evidence of ...

to allow people to petition the administration on any issue. He and his team were also responsible for the high-traffic live stream of the

State of the Union The State of the Union Address (sometimes abbreviated to SOTU) is an annual message delivered by the president of the United States to a Joint session of the United States Congress, joint session of the United States Congress near the beginning ...

speech. Heyman oversaw the release of APIs permitting external access to data created by the We the People petition website. The release of the "write API" exposed the first U.S. government API permitting data to be written on systems by outside third-party applications. Heyman coxed the U.S. National Team Lightweight Men's

Eight 8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. Etymology English ''eight'', from Old English '', æhta'', Proto-Germanic ''*ahto'' is a direct continuation of Proto-Indo-European '' *oḱtṓ(w)-'', and as such cognate wi ...

to 5th place at the

2007 World Rowing Championships The 2007 World Rowing Championships were World Rowing Championships that were held from 26 August to 2 September 2007 at Oberschleißheim Regatta Course in Oberschleißheim near Munich, Germany. Medal summary Men's events Non-Olympic classes ...

Munich, Germany Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

References

External links

OSCON 2013: Leigh Heyman, "We The People: Open Source, Open Data"

Leigh Heyman: White House author page

Interview with Leigh Heyman from the Executive Office of the President
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heyman, Leigh Living people Obama administration personnel People from Boston Year of birth missing (living people)