President Barack Obama's new Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra has his work cut out. The White House announcement today says:
As Chief Technology Officer, Chopra will promote technological innovation to help the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing health care costs, to protecting the homeland. Together with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, they will help give all Americans a government that is effective, efficient, and transparent.
"The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we are spending their money — and can hold us accountable for the results," Obama said.
Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch says:
The choice comes after months of speculation, during which many of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures, including Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt (among many others) were named as possible candidates. Whether or not some of these people actually wanted the position is another story, but obviously President Obama chose a different route.
Chopra is currently Virginia’s Secretary of Technology. TechPresident says in early 2007 under Chopra's leadership, Virginia was one of the first states to move, with Google's help, to make its state websites more searchable and thus more accessible to ordinary citizens. The state has also been in the forefront of efforts to create robust web services tracking the giant government stimulus spending package enacted by Obama. Vivek Kundra, Obama's Chief Information Officer, who also came out of Virginia, it adds.
Virginia has started using tools and applications like iTunes and Ning in education and healthcare, writes Tim O'Reilly on O'Reilly Radar. He explains Why Aneesh Chopra is a great choice for Federal CTO and quotes a background paper to highlight the different roles of Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra:
The responsibilities of the CIO are to use information technology to transform the ways in which the government does business. The CTO will develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn.
Two more Indian Americans join Obama administration, says the Indian website Rediff. It reports:
Rajiv Shah, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been nominated as the Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics in the US Department of Agriculture.
Shah's job as director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation was to to help the world's poor lead healthy and productive lives, says Rediff.
The Washington Post says: Chopra had put in long hours in Washington helping Obama's transition team get him ready for his first day as president job on Jan. 20. He was one of about 50 volunteers from across the nation serving on the transition's technology, innovation and government reform policy working group.
Chopra earned a masters in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997, and a BA degree from The Johns Hopkins University in 1994, says Federal Computer Week.
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