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Obama Appoints Non-Tech Guy As CTO
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "President Barack Obama has named his chief technology officer, and the appointee is not a Silicon Valley name like so many predicted. He is Aneesh Chopra. As the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, his job has been to 'leverage technology in government reform, promote Virginia's innovation agenda, and foster technology-related economic development with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship.' But Chopra's not a tech guy. Before he got his secretary job in 2005, he was a managing director at the Advisory Board Company, a public-market health care think tank, as well as an angel investor."
O'Reilly Radar is running an article discussing why Chopra is a good choice for federal CTO.
Please read the last article linked in the summary. It definitely makes the appointment sound intelligent.
From the linked article, I'd say he's onboard with Open Source
(easiest quote to find: Virginia having "the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country")
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that he's not a tech guy himself; he won't be expected to go out and do the techy work. What the job requires is an understanding of technology and government, and the ability to get stuff done by supporting the right things, managing people... in short he doesn't need to be a geek so long as he has the right geeks working for him.
taking someone who is not very tech-oriented/aligned and putting them as CTO is just like taking politicians and lawyers and asking them to draft bills on technology.
See how well that's been working for us?
The purpose of school shouldn't be teach students to be drones that can't think for themselves. It should be "teach them how to learn". Everybody I grew up with learned on DOS, UNIX (icons ftw) and Apple. We had little trouble adapting to the changing computer world. Now if people learned on Linux right now, they would have a lot less catching up then we ever did, even if they had to switch to windows for a job. Tech concepts and not memorization and you will get a lot further.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Don't you work for non-lawyers all the time? They defer to you because you -are- a lawyer, but I think you might have to rescind your comment :)
I do IT, and not everyone in the chain of command knows more than I do about IT. They do know more about other things, like management, or sales, or marketing. My job in IT is to enable them to do their jobs, and so I have to know a little bit about their job, and they have to know a little bit about mine, but that's all.
If we were to live in some upside down world where we demanded everyone paying us had to know more about what we're doing than we do, no one would get anything done. Why are they paying you if they know more than you?
And this applies to you too, Ray. Your clients pay you, or your firm, or however you have it set up, and they don't know nearly as much as you do. If they did, they wouldn't be paying you.
You grew into OS office software and can go back any time, if needed. Those kids won't be able to do that. You'd effectively be crippling them.
Are kids dumber now that they ever were? The first computer I had contact with through school was an Apple IIe, did this crush my ability to learn to use Windows when it finally came out? Really, that is one of the most innane arguments I have heard. If we expose our children to many different computers/OSs/software suites, it leaves them with adaptability.
Hell, it wasn't until rather late in high school that I actually found a computer, in school, using Windows, with Office on it, and all the other "standard" stuff, before that there was some nice DOS boxes, a few early Macs, a TON of Apple IIes, and I even think a lowly C64 and Amiga in there. All of these with their seporate and very different OSs, different "productivity" software, and different ways of interacting with the computer. I, for some reason, doubt that this hindered my ability to exist in society much, much less... you know... use a computer. It probably helped greatly with the second bit, since it kept me from getting locked in to any particular scheme of computing.
Children are adaptive by nature, and the more we make them experience novel situations, the smarter they get. It forces them out of the rote "click x in menu y to do z", and into the the actual basis of the experience itself into a "I want to do z, now what?" mindframe.
I know several people who can't use the GUI in Ubuntu/Gnome, just because it doesn't look exactly like Windows, even though it almost exactly the same mechanically. I would rather our children don't become this.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
While his post was insightful and deserves some moderation to that effect, I am going to have to disagree. Lawyers and politicians absolutely should be legislating technology because legislation is their job. I couldn't do it. I think our problem has been that they are doing it wrong, for a variety of reasons.
I find a great deal of irony in your original post and this reply, because while you are obviously a lawyer, your original post demonstrates *exactly* the behaviors I believe are the full requirements I would expect from a great tech executive or politician.
First, you obviously read a tech article on your own, in your free time, displaying interest. Second, you formed an opinion. Third, you reformed your opinion based on a respected expert. Fourth, and most importantly, you went to a large community of experts (to varying degrees) in order to modify your opinion with the input of people with a greater professional interest in the subject than your own.
In all seriousness, Mr. Beckerman, despite being a lawyer and not a professional technologist, you would make a better CTO (or politician) than the vast majority of the rest of us. I would even venture to say that technologists shouldn't be forming large policies for as diverse and large an organization as the federal government. They are more likely to have biases and pay less attention to technologies they are less familiar with through professional experience.
As a side note, if you could chair the FCC or hop on in some tech position at the FTC, I would really appreciate it.
I think the argument is more that the schools should be spending their money on, say, teacher's salaries instead of Microsoft Windows.
Oh thank you god! Finally someone who actually agrees with me on what the purpose of education is. Teaching should be about stimulating the kids to want to learn, to want to find out the whys and hows!...and give them the tools to do so. Off course it is an other matter in higher education, but that is besides the point here as people seems to be talking about creating mindless drones belonging to one camp or the other.