I’ll be right with you, Mr. President, as soon as I fix the feed for this Law of the Sea treaty hearing
Barack Obama is swinging through the valley today and will use the setting to unveil a lineup of technology policy initiatives, including a proposal for a national chief technology officer. Unlike the Bush administration’s cybersecurity czar, Obama’s CTO would be charged with building and maintaining systems for government transparency, including live Webcasts of the meetings of rule-making agencies, Cabinet officials and other executives. Another duty would be setting up a sophisticated and interactive feedback system for the public to talk to the politicians. Obama will also call for network neutrality, more aggressive government support of broadband access and a review of competition in the wireless spectrum. All of this ought to play well in the valley, where Hillary Clinton currently leads the Democratic pack in the polls.
But that CTO job — prestigious, but what migraine fodder it would be trying keep the federal bureaucracy’s systems upgraded, running and safe — like trying to choreograph a synchronized swimming routine for water moccasins. It would take an extraordinary technologist/diplomat to pull it off. Any nominations from the floor?
Like anything else, it’s going to take the allocation of adequate resources to make anything happen. If the CTO is given a mandate but then has to beg each agency to allocate money to the task, it will be doomed to failure. What you would need is the CTO to build a government-wide system and require the various agencies / departments to use it. If they can really be independent, they might have a shot at getting something done.
Good job description. Wrong title. A real chief technology officer would exert some rational guidance on our energy, automotive, and aerospace R&D efforts. His biggest challenge would be overcoming entrenched special interests highly invested in wasteful or obsolete technologies — and federally funded jobs programs. Along the way, he should rejuvenate the US manufacturing structure.
We REALLY need to reorient our priorities, and fast!
Entrenched special interests indeed. It’s not just the older technologies that are obsolete. Ethonol from corn is about as stupid as it gets from an economic, environmental, efficiency, water use, and carbon footprint, but try to pry the federal subsidies loose from those special interests. Given that we always seem to replace one special interest with another, Obama’s initiative isn’t just doomed to failure, it’s already stillborn. The only thing that will work is private initiative that makes the market. A chief technology bureaucrat is a rodblock, not an expeditor.
Nomination: Someone like Maynard Webb, who handled eBay’s ferocious growth period.
I think the problems that face our nation are so broad as to not easily be done by one person. The best US-CTO will be someone who surrounds themselves with intelligent and informed people, regardless of political bent. The USCTO can always specify the directions of protection policies, but implementation should be done by people the CTO trusts to be responsible and to do the job “right” (whatever that will mean at the time).
Unfortunately, in any field where you have to advertise yourself and your deeds to survive, “fiefdom-ship” overrides enlightened judgment so they will “survive” in their job. Even a bigger problem — those who do their job well will never be seen as to have a catastrophe happen on their watch. If they plan ahead “too well”, real catastrophes will be extremely rare.
Ooops…hit submit a bit too fast…why is having “catastrophes be rare” a problem? Because people will not see what you are doing, and may start believing that you or your department are not really essential — thus back to the same root problem: survival in their positions (jobs).
CTO nice sounding, inoffensive idea. Obama, HRC etc might “address’ population growth. We’re poisoning our little spacship in large part because we make more of use who use more resources.
What politician will actually say, BTW, that “It’s time we stopped teen-age girls having babies”?
With mandatory teen birth control, our cities would quickly become crime free and then we could all move back to them and all might enjoy some cooperative peace. The girls, once educated, would be a hell a lot better off–and be good mothers too.
How about making EARMARKS really transparent too while you are at it Obama.