Keith Porcaro

CTO, General Counsel

Keith served as SIMLab’s CTO and General Counsel. He led SIMLab’s technology initiatives and work in the United States. Keith’s work focuses on making complex systems more accessible and understandable. He is looking for short or long-term engagements to conduct research, help design or build new technology systems, improve or evaluate existing tools, or develop digital organizational policies.

Keith joined SIMLab in 2014 as a Project Director. He ran our Google Impact Award project, designing and developing SMS and web-based tools to expedite a land titling programs in Odisha, India. The project was an Early Impact Finalist for a USAID “Harnessing the Data Revolution for Resilience” Award. Keith also conducted technology trainings for civil society actors around the world, including in Iraq, Myanmar, and India.

Much of Keith’s work was focused in the United States, where he worked with legal aid providers and other nonprofits to design and implement technology systems. His clients included Bay Area Legal Aid, DC Public Library, Legal Aid of Nebraska, KIPP Delta, Mississippi Access to Justice Commission, and Duke Law School. Keith’s work was featured in the June 2016 issue of the ABA Journal.

In addition to his consulting work, Keith writes about design and information architecture principles for using technology to deliver public services. You can read the first two entries in this ongoing series here and here. Among others, Keith has presented his work at the Legal Services Corporation Technology Innovation Grant Conference, the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference, and the World Bank Law, Justice, and Development Week.

While at SIMLab, Keith developed technology prototypes, aimed at making it easier for non-technical clients and partners to leverage technology in their work. His prototypes included Mush, a tool to send files over SMS, and Friendly, a tool for generating question and answer applications without code or the internet. You can follow Keith’s upcoming side project here.

This year, Keith is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He is also teaching a class at Georgetown University Law Center on Criminal Justice Technology, Policy, and Law. Keith is competent in a handful of programming languages (JavaScript, Elixir, Ruby, Python), and is licensed to practice law in California.

Keith is looking for a new short-term project or long-term home. He is most interested in helping a team build something new, whether a technology product, a digital strategy, or a data policy. You can contact Keith here, or check out his homepage or LinkedIn.