Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age appoints its first Executive Director

We are excited to share that we have hired Pontus Westerberg as our first Executive Director. Pontus will help us achieve our mission to ensure that those who educate current and future public service leaders embed key digital-area skills into their curricula and training programs.

Pontus brings 20 years of experience to Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Before joining he spent over 10 years at UN-Habitat, where he led global programmes and advised governments on civic technology, smart cities, open data, and urban innovation. He has been a member of the steering group of the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, the UN Interagency Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, and the Advisory Group of the Finnish-Estonian Smart City Centre. He is a co-founder of the UN Innovation Technology Accelerator for Cities and the Block by Block Foundation. Before joining the UN in 2012, he worked in the NGO sector for 10 years.

In his role, Pontus will take responsibility for the delivery of our mission, as well as providing leadership, strategy, and administrative oversight as we move into the our next phase. He will grow our network, raise additional funds and lead the delivery of many more masterclasses, seminars and training events, with the aim of equipping half a million public service learners with digital era public service skills by 2030. This will be supported by a comprehensive evaluation system to ensure that our work achieves real impact.

With Pontus onboard we will also work to expand the research base and case study base in the digital public administration arena so that the quality of teaching can steadily rise and become ever more sensitive to different teaching and learning contexts. During 2024 we will deliver a research workstream of workshops, network building and interdisciplinary research collaborations.

“I’m very excited to join Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. In my work with local and national governments at the UN, I’ve seen that a lack of digital competence in the public sector is a major barrier to digital transformation achieving a positive impact. I look forward to contributing to our goal of providing half a million public servants with essential digital era public service skills and knowledge before the end of the decade.”

- Pontus Westerberg, Executive Director

Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age (TPSDA) was founded in 2019 to drive up the overall number of public servants who have the fundamental skills they need to succeed in the digital era. TPSDA received initial funding from the Public Interest Technology Infrastructure Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Schmidt Futures, and operates globally with leading academics and practitioners in the field of public policy. It has established an international community of like-minded educators and provides free high-quality teaching materials.

You can reach Pontus at pontus@teachingpublicservice.digital.