Alexander B. Howard

Alexander B. Howard is an independent writer based in Washington, D.C. Over the past decade, Howard has advocated for more open, transparent, and accountable governance at governments and corporations at nonprofit organizations, leading to tangible improvements in public access to information online.

He is the founder of Civic Texts, a publication focused on emerging technologies, digital democracy and public policy. Howard is the co-founder of the Open Government Roundtable, the co-director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, and a member of the advisory committee of the FWD50 digital government conference. 

Howard served as a member of the U.S. Freedom of Information Advisory Committee at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in 2022-2024. During his term, he contributed to recommendations to improve implementation and modernization of the most important transparency and accountability law in the United States. He successfully advocated for a U.S. government-wide memorandum on FOIA.gov and best practices for proactive disclosure. Howard also served an unpaid member of the Government of Canada’s independent advisory panel on open government from 2012-2015.

He has held fellowships at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and the Networked Transparency Policy Project in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He published research on the art and science of data journalism, with special focus on the relationship between open government data and media organizations.

Before his work as a nonpartisan open government advocate, Howard was the first senior editor for technology and society at the Huffington Post, a columnist at TechRepublic, and a contributor to TechPresident, among other publications, from the Atlantic to Science to the New York Times. He was the Washington Correspondent for Radar at O’Reilly Media, where he researched, reported on, and covered emerging technology and global open movements, including open government, open science, open source software, open data, and open journalism.

Prior to joining O’Reilly, he was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com at TechTarget, where he wrote about how the laws and regulations that affect information technology are changing, spanning the issues of online identity, data protection, risk management, electronic privacy and IT security, and the broader topics of online culture and enterprise technology.

He is a graduate of Colby College and enjoys cooking, cycling, hiking, and spending time with family and dogs in his spare time.