A former research editor and manager at Palo Alto's Institute for the Future, Jess is currently senior analyst on the public policy and government relations team at Google. As a freelance writer and cultural critic, Jess's writing has appeared in MAKE, The Onion, 7x7, and on Boing Boing, AlterNet, and several Bay Area music blogs. In 2009, Jess was nominated for a Webby award in the "Website: Weird" category for a blog she co-created, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. In 2002 she served as an intern in President Clinton's post-presidential office in Harlem. Jess received her B.A. in politics from NYU and her master's in information management and systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information. In 2011, she earned the I School's James R. Chen award for outstanding final project in information research for her master's thesis, "Making Metadata: The Case of MusicBrainz."