United States CTO

I just learned from the La Times that the new CTO was finally
appointed. As the CIO, he also comes from Virginia. His name
is Aneesh Chopra (see also a note about him 4 years ago).

This is what President Obama is expecting from this nomination:

"Aneesh and Jeffrey will work closely with our
Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, who
is responsible for setting technology policy across the
government, and using technology to improve
security, ensure transparency, and lower costs.
The goal is to give all Americans a voice in
their government and ensure that they know exactly
how we’re spending their money – and can hold us
accountable for the results. "

I marked the phrase "ensure transparency" above.

The same LA Times news reports on the new position in
federal government, the Chief Performance Officer.

Read more about the new CTO from Tim O'Reilly´s blog, which
includes a video where Chopra talks about Open Government, data
mining, data standards, legacy, broadband, health systems and
so on.

It seems that his strong point is the vision that government
should be in the upfront usage of new technology and not behind it,
as it seems it is in the United States, as well as in other countries.

Bringing the possibilities of IT to government is his main drive.

Interesting as well is his view on approaching R&D as support for
attracting new industries, a policy applied in Virginia for the case
of the Rolls Royce jet engine plant.

Open Government

President Obama issued a memorandum directing the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services to produce a Open Government Directive.

The major goals of this initiative are:

• Government should be transparent
  
• Government should be participatory
  
• Government should be collaborative

Although the major focus will be information transparency we hope that at same point the work group do also point out the need for process transparency, which will lead to the discussion of software transparency.

Let’s hope that the idea of Open Government does flourish and be an example to other countries.

P.S.
During the process of writing the above note, I went on searching to find the link to the Chief Technology Officer site. I could not find one. However, I found out that there will be a Chief Information Officer. I could not find a site for the US CIO, but found out the site for the Council of US CIOs.