Obama's New Tech Guru

Forbes ^ | 4/27/2009 | Tim O'Reilly,

[bruinbirdman]

How federal CTO Aneesh Chopra will make government innovative.

I was delighted when President Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first chief technology officer on April 18.

I've been working for much of the past year to understand what many have been calling Government 2.0, and in that process, Chopra has been one of those who have taught me the most about how we can build a better government with the help of technology. He is an excellent choice as federal CTO, for many reasons.

Chopra has been focused for the past three years on the specific technology challenges of government. Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government policy, competing constituencies, budgets that often contain legislative mandates, regulations that may no longer be relevant but are still in force, and many other unique constraints. In his three-year tenure as secretary of technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills. In fact, last year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers ranked Virginia No. 1 in technology management.

The role of the CTO is to help our country explore the transformative potential of new technology. Consider a few of these Virginia technology initiatives:

--The first officially approved open source textbook in the country.

--The integration of iTunes U with Virginia's state education assessment framework.

--The Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod touch applications for middle-school math teaching.

--A Ning-based social network to connect clinicians working in small health care offices in remote locations.

[D-fendr]

Yeah, incredible machines, I read Obama saying computers are gonna pay for universal health care.

[ChicagahAl]

I couldn't get the link to work for “open source textbook”, but if it's like Wikipedia, anyone can amend it at any time.

I imagine that the history of the US, will quickly become unrecognizable to those of us, old enough to have lived through some of it.

[Crim]

http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/aneesh-chopra.asp?cycle=08

JAL (just another liberal)

[iopscusa]

WTH has Forbes become another statist kneepadder or have they been kneepadding for a good while? I rarely read Forbes but the Forbees I hear on FOX seem to be pretty mushy...

[mikey_hates_everything]

These guys are just figureheads. We get memos from their offices but they are pretty much ignored at the agency level.

[NHResident]

O’reilly’s column reads like a teenager’s love note to the flashiest girl in school. If you will take note, Silicon Valley is full of guilt-laden, high tech, science-challenged liberals. The state of CA isn’t blue simply because of the morons in the south - the vote in and around SF provide plenty of support. Also, notice where a lot of the effort of these ‘innovative’ hi-tech firm has been directed for the last year - it hasn’t been on innovation but in figuring out how to claim their (more than) fair share of the free government money. EMC has published collateral and has a customer service on how to qualify for government funding. IBM, HP, CA, etc., etc. have major programs targeted at laying claim to funding or in building and supporting interest groups that will push mandates to compel investment in new ‘smart’ infrastructure. One more move to pick the pockets of taxpayers.