Archives for February 2017

Prakash Janakiraman is Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Nextdoor, the free and private social network for neighborhoods.

Janakiraman began his career as a software engineer at Excite@Home in 1996 before moving into engineering management at Shopping.com and Epinions. Prior to Nextdoor, Janakiraman spent nearly three years at Google, where he managed engineering teams for Google Maps, Google Base, and Froogle.

Janakiraman is from Hayward, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley.

Favorite neighborhood memory: playing basketball, soccer, and baseball games with his neighborhood friends – and using up every minute of sunlight before his parents called him in for dinner.

Sana Syed is the spokesperson and Director of the Public Information Office for the City of Dallas. She managed the city’s international response to Ebola and the July 7 ambush on DPD officers and developed and executed an aggressive two-year transparency and communications plan.

Sana supervises a team of 17 and oversees a $1.6 million departmental budget and an additional $8 million account for cable broadcasting. Her responsibilities include overseeing open records for the city, broadcast production, graphic design and external communications. Sana recently announced the development of the Communications & Policy Institute, which will serve students from every major university in North Texas and DISD high school students.

Sana started her career as a broadcast journalist and over a period of ten years worked as an assignment editor, producer, reporter, and news anchor. She has worked at KDFW and KTVT in Dallas, KOKH in Oklahoma City, OK and WBRZ in Baton Rouge, LA. Sana holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of Texas at Arlington and a Master of Science in Journalism from the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism. She is completing her PhD in Urban Planning and Public Policy at UTA.