Courtesty of Charlotte Hill
Grief over young White House staffer
Remembrances of Jake Brewer spread across the loose-knit but virtually intimate world of civic coders.
The tech-savvy idealists who help President Barack Obama bypass the news media and make government work better have, in tragedy, rendered the obituary obsolete.
Remembrances of White House Senior Technology Adviser Jake Brewer spread across the loose-knit but virtually intimate world of civic coders, transparency activists and digital organizers within hours of his death in a charity bike race accident on Saturday. Anecdotes and outpourings flooded Facebook long before the press office emailed out Obama’s statement or U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith posted a blog memoriam on Sunday evening.
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“I've spent today oscillating between feeling like I've been punched in the gut, a disbelief this could be real, and desire to focus on the task at hand and do right by the memory to Jake,” wrote Matthew McAllister, a colleague of Brewer’s in the CTO’s office, on Facebook on Sunday. “When you first met him, you felt like he was a long lost friend that you just reconnected with. I knew he was someone I wanted to follow in future roles.”
Brewer’s passion was connecting people to the bureaucracy through technology, and his gift was speaking the language that could recruit tech experts to his cause.
“He understood government, he understood Washington, D.C.,” said Jennifer Pahlka, a former deputy White House CTO and executive director ofCode for America, “but he could come out here and speak the language that made it exciting for geeks.”
Perhaps most fittingly for Brewer, who was a top figure at the petition platform Change.org before joining the Office of Science and Technology Policy in June, friends and former colleagues created a site where people can post their own remembrances of the 34-year-old father.
“Previous generations of Washington, the importance was centered on an individual,” said Adam Conner, a vice president at Brigade, and formerly of Facebook’s Washington office. “The ones who today have the most influence and impact are the ones with networks,” Conner said, calling Brewer “the consummate connector.”
Brewer’s print obituaries note the traditional accomplishments of a rising Washington star and renaissance man: government data pioneer, published photographer, left-leaning husband of the Hot Air editor and Fox News analyst Mary Katharine Ham, who is pregnant with their second child.
The online remembrances are decidedly more down to earth, even sillier, than the typical memorials of Important Government Officials, though equally glowing. Stacy Bower’s post on jakememories.org noted that he’d won the “Senior Superlative Art award” his senior year at Columbia Central High School in central Tennessee and included an awkward group photo.
His cousin Courtney Hoover recalled “sorta checking out a tanned, muscly, fit runner” a few years ago in Chicago, only to realize that it was, well, her cousin Jake.
Brewer was known for his athleticism. He was participating in the two-day, 150-mile Ride to Conquer Cancer when he lost control of his bicycle and rolled into an oncoming car. His wife’s Instagram account, which became something of an annotated tribute to his life on Sunday, included several photos of Brewer in hiking gear — and one in a superhero outfit, with their toddler daughter, Georgia.
Clay Johnson, Brewer’s longtime friend and collaborator at the Sunlight Foundation, called him the perennial superhero sidekick in a Facebook post.
It betrayed a bitter sense of loss: “Of course Jake Brewer died riding a bicycle fighting somebody else’s cancer… Whether it was the cancer of corruption or pollution or the cancer of apathy, or the cancer of actual cancer that kills you. Jake Brewer was always fighting our cancers for us.”
Johnson’s post was also read at a gathering in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s South Court Auditorium on Monday morning, where aides from around the White House tearfully shared stories of that one White House colleague likened to a “mayor of the building” despite having been on the job only 15 weeks. Even the bartenders at the Oval Room had already learned his name.
In that time, one of Brewer’s biggest accomplishments was a report on how to expand broadband connectivity and speed it up for rural areas, schools and the poor inner cities. It was released on Monday, after a Broadband Opportunity Council meeting that held a moment of silence for him.
A campaign to cover education expenses for Georgia and her sibling on the way met its $200,000 goal within 24 hours on Monday.
Other in-person remembrances were held: Change.org founders organized gatherings in San Francisco, New York and Washington on Monday evening. At the company's D.C. office in Penn Quarter, the crowd of several hundred alternated between sniffles and giggles as Ham offered an unusually candid reflection on her loss.
Noting their political differences, Ham said they weren't trying to be a cute "hashtag ThisTown" brand. Rather, she said, "We were together because we believed everyone was so much more than that."
Ham added, "There were moments when we had dumb political fights and dumb nonpolitical fights. Some of them happened in the last month. And that's OK."
Brewer will be honored with one of the more conventionally prestigious ceremonies for the Washington elite, with a memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral on Friday morning.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/jake-brewer-grief-social-media-white-house-213909#ixzz4854hEa36
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