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Senate Sources Say CTO Confirmation a Done Deal
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will examine the nomination of Aneesh Chopra as the first-ever federal Chief Technology Officer. Senate sources said they were not aware of any debate surrounding his nomination. You'd think the hack-for-$10-million-ransom of Virginia's Prescription Monitoring Program might be good for a question or two. Or the wisdom of appointing a CTO who's no technologist. It might also be worth bringing up Chopra's membership in TiE-DC, a group which promises 'exclusive peer networking events' with government officials and Federal contractors, including TiE-DC sponsor Microsoft. Are there any other issues that might make the Confirmation Hearing more than a rubber-stamping?"
As a Brit, this appointment won't affect me directly. But indirectly US Government policy has an important global effect. I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.
The ODF Alliance have welcomed the appointment, as have Tim O'Reilly and a host of other people so I'm hopeful that it will turn out to be a good thing
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Is there no way you could have written a more biased, uninformed summary? Geesh...
It's submissions like this that bring down the quality of slashdot.
I think the question is not are there issues that prevent a rubber stamp, but are there issues that SHOULD prevent a rubber stamp. What happens in Congress and what Congress is supposed to do are 2 different things. Politically, I think this is viewed as a fringe issue few will care about, so no ones wants to rock the popular Obama boat challenging it.
Why does your post above sound like diatribes I've heard about Jews and banking?
There are a lot of Indian IT workers. There are also a lot of American IT workers, too. So what?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
By all means, centralize all IT policy for the federal government into some agency that knows basically squat about what each department does. These days, inefficiency in government is about all the chance we get for freedom.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Dude, Congress ignored illegal wiretaps, Bush signing statements, being lied to about Iraq, and torture. But they did find time to have hearings on the Bowl Championship Series playoff system.
Do you think they really give a f*ck about something substantial?
Perhaps as a Canadian I don't appreciate the finer points of the American political process, but I'm having trouble finding a meaningful relationship in this sequence of events:
1. Senate Hearing is scheduled.
2. Random Blog quotes unnamed "[s]enate sources" as saying "they were not aware of any debate surrounding his nomination."
3. Slashdot editors release a news story with a headline of "Senate Sources Say CTO Confirmation a Done Deal"
4. Thinly disguised editorial consisting mostly of anti-Microsoft remarks and an assertion that confirmation hearings are a sham process is submitted as a news story to Slashdot.
Sigh. I guess I'll have to reconsider Slashdot as primary source of news and go back to reading newspapers and watching C-SPAN.
I think "knowing anything at all about what you're doing" stopped being a requirement for executive positions around the time of Worldcom's collapse... at least if you go by public statements by major corporate executives since then.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I read something negative about Microsoft in the summary and decided to jump in with an uninformed jibe of my own.
M$ is Teh Suxorz!
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
We have the best politicians money can buy.
Ramen
Need not be overly technically savvy, just be able to understand
the basic ideas and make a fair choice. Sadly. politics WILL rear
it's ugly head and compromise things. So sad.
God forbid someone in the VA-MD-DC area belongs to a group used for professional networking! As we all know, most non-profit professional groups have no sponsors whatsoever.
Also, who's to say he's not qualified to do the job just because of being labeled not a technologist back in 2005? Maybe what is needed for a CTO position is someone who understands how government and policy is applied (see MPP degree reference) to solve problems, and how the application of technology is a key factor?
I do agree, though, some questions about the Prescription Monitoring Program would be warranted.
But really, with the tax problems of other appointees, maybe most of this stuff is seen as small potatoes. If you don't agree, though, feel free to contact someone on the committee. The hearing starts on Tuesday.
Interesting. Why do you believe that?
Because the truth of the matter is twofold:
a) First Democrats were terrified of losing everything in the wake of 9/11. Up until the invasion of Iraq, their strategy was to try and out Republican the Republicans on national security. And, the American people were -super- pissed off. There was a poll that came out just after 9/11 that showed that 90% of all Americans favored the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. Despite the whole classroom incident, Bush on the rubble at the WTC with the megaphone was one of the greatest moments of any President in our lifetime, so great, frankly, that he milked that one moment for the rest of his term without ever really living up to it again.
You have to remember that if Democrats go lefty after 9/11, they might lose the Senate worse than they did. In those days, a Republican veto proof majority meant that Social Security becomes privatized. With the stakes that high, there's really no limit to what the Democrats would do to save their baby.
b) Democrats are actually patriots too, and they might have actually felt betrayed. Let's remember that in the 1990s American policy towards Islam was continually conciliatory in hopes of reaching out. We swept a bunch of terrorist attacks under the rug, pushed for a Palestinian state, looked the other way when Saddam cheated the sanctions, let Pakistan become completely islamified and ignored crackdowns in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and finally we bombed the wrong side in the balkans war, to do a favor to the muslims.
All of this brought us nothing, but 9/11. So yeah, they were in a political climate where they felt they had to be ruthless, or lose everything.
This is my sig.
The democrats have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and solid control of the House. They aren't going to make their own party look bad and don't have to give the Republicans a chance to do it. This is the problem with putting a single party in almost total power. We will see more of this until some sort of balance is restored.
If you thought the Republicans did a lot of damage controlling the Executive and Legislative, just wait. The Democrats have an opportunity here with the overwhelming majority to do far more. For all of you scientists out there you are going to get a crash course in faith because that is about the only thing we can have that bad does not become worse over the next two or more years. We certainly don't have any control or checks or balances.
Understand that this is not a Republican vs Democrat rant. I don't trust any of them to look out for the good of the nation. That's why I am deeply concerned about any one party dominating government.
We all discussed Aneesh Chopra on /. a month ago, folks. No less than Tim O'Reilly has vouched for him as a technological bad-ass. Read that. Read the comments. Then return here and carry on. There's no need for us to have to re-learn who this guy is every time he's written about here.
It has been stated that maybe what is needed for a CTO position is someone who understands how government and policy is applied. If you watch this video where Paul Chopra in his capacity as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia keynoted the 5th Annual State of the Net Conference 2009, you may come to the conclusion as I did that he is a very capable man, with the requisite political savvy to get things done. Political skills may turn out to be more important than geek level technical knowledge in the end. In this entire 51 minute video, it is hard to find fault with Mr. Chopra as he discusses such things as Virginia's open text book initiative. However it isn't until near the very end that some serious concerns are triggered for me. At 38:13 he speaks of a new initiative called "Plugged In" that rests on a very basic hypothesis that "In 6 months we can take a high school drop out and prepare them for a technology job." It is a GED program that reconstitutes the curriculum for adults adding in certificates "with the help of partners like Microsoft". A state government promoting a private company is worrisome to me.
The second concern I had was at 48:30 where he is responding to a question about how to best stimulate innovative start-ups and entrepreneurship. To this he replies by talking about his "GAP Fund" that supplies $100 K investments to new start-ups "Restricted only to innovative technology companies that are grounded in intellectual property." "We have a billion service companies, but it's the grounding in intellectual property that to us is the secret, so it's targeting limited resources to intellectual property". He does not explain why "a billion service companies" are not important to him.
Now when I played the question from the audience that provoked this response over a couple of times, it struck me as very strange. The question was: "There are tens of thousands of small startups that are really producing innovative products based on intellectual property. What is the best way that a state can promote small startups, and making sure of course that they collaborate with their IP, but it's protected and monetized in a way that they can sell it out to other places?" It leads one to ponder - why does the speaker consider intellectual property so important? Why does he emphasise it in just that way, rather than speak about hi tech startups in general? Could he have been a Microsoft plant? Suddenly as I listened to this, I got a vision of Microsoft lobbyists and sales people crawling all over government initiatives everywhere, making little deals here and there to ensure the open source is blocked at every turn.
Since the White House said Chopra will be creating jobs and reducing health care costs, it seems a question or two about his involvement with Healthaxis should be asked. In 2005, Chopra took a seat on the Board of Healthaxis, which was brokered as part of an offshoring deal that required Healthaxis to throw offshoring work to an investor's BPO company in an effort to reduce the costs of its Utah and Jamaica resources. At the time of his 2006 resignation, Healthaxis reported to the SEC that Chopra, who also sat on the firm's Compensation Committee, had 'no disagreement with the Company on any matter'.
Should we contact Committee member Mark Warner, whose Friends of Mark Warner PAC receives contributions from Mr. Chopra? :-)
While I can see how a Notes-to-Exchange migration can go horribly wrong, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that the idea itself has a lot of merit. I've turned down job offers because I saw that they used Notes for e-mail. It may be a good application platform, but it's a horrible e-mail platform.
That said, I can certainly relate to your views on CTOs. More and more often, I see CTOs who have business degrees and have to call for support for even the most minor things. Business degrees are fine for CEOs or COOs, but much as I expect a CFO to have a financial degree of some sort, I want my CTO to have a technical degree somewhere in there.
The first test of a CEO is to ask about some company, and see how long it takes to bring up Gartner. I'd say that it's almost an automatic hire if they do not bring it up at all, and an automatic rejection if the first words out are, "Well, according to Gartner..."
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
When it comes to selecting individuals for political appointments, quite often they are done for... well... political reasons. Sometimes it's because of bipartisanship, coalition building, or because someone is really well qualified. Other times it is because they are well networked or engaged in a little quid pro quo. Sure, if it is to the level of Blagojevich they may get caught, and we should discourage the outright sale of governmental positions. On the other hand, I still think as long as he was working within the rules, a total of $2450 in donations to Mark Warner isn't quite to the level where I'd be calling the ethics committee.
It certainly didn't hurt his chances to make $2750 in donations to various Obama supporting groups either, but do I think it was a primary reason he was selected? Not really. I think he got selected because he's well connected and has prior experience in healthcare. With Obama's big push for electronic healthcare records and other cost savings measures, I do agree all the more with wanting some questions to be raised concerning the theft of pharmaceutical records in VA, but depending how the investigation goes, I believe the highest uphill it will get in the org chain is to this guy. More likely though, it'll stay a problem of the agency that oversaw the day to day operations.
Generally the answer is; the people doing the hiring, being time-serving lackies, don't want anyone working for them that is smarter then them. And being non-techies themselves, risk losing control or looking stupid, as in a new techie-CTO would wonder why they got their job. The best way of getting found out is to hire a non-techie CTO and keep recycling the real IT staff .:)
.. Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills .. Try a few of these Virginia technology initiatives on for size:'
'Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government
* the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook.
* integrating 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;
* a state-funded "venture capital fund" to allow government agencies to try out risky but promising new approaches to delivering their services or improving their productivity;
* a lightweight approval and testing process that allows the government to try out new technologies before making a full, expensive commitment.
- unquote -
If he's not a techie, then who actually created these ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Or, the Republicans acted contrary to their stated principles. Thus, one could support most Republican principles while despising what the current Republicans in power do.
Well said. I met with Chopra after he was nominated for this job, and my perception is that he's very in-tune with how government policy is impacted by technology, and how technology creates jobs in the private sector.
He's not an open source advocate per se, but he definitely understands the principles of openness which can change the game in terms of how markets operate. So, I think we can rely on him to make honest assessments of where open source makes sense and deploying it (or advocating that others do so).
My impression is that he's not a blind supporter of anything technological, but has a reasonable understanding of the relationships between policy and technology.
I also know that jews are exclusionary and racists
Unlike you, Adolph?
Go fuck yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."