Interesting article on one of Obama's grand schemes for America in the 21st Century when he's inagurated:
Obama: world's first tech revolutionaryThe most significant cabinet decision by President-elect Barack Obama will be the creation of a Chief Technology Officer. This is unprecedented and will, more than any other cabinet position, define his presidency and launch the transformation of government from its current nature to what’s known as the 2.0 world.
America’s CTO will not only assume the job of cyber-protection for the government against terrorists, hackers and criminals. But it will revolutionize governance itself and here are the main goals:
1. The CTO will be responsible for enhancing and financially supporting technology of all kinds: environmental, scientific, engineering, medical. This will include massive funding for green (US$150 billion in 10 years), biotech, computer tech and pure scientific research but will also involve incentives to universities to step up engineering graduates annually from 60,000 a year to double that number within half a generation.
2. America’s CTO will be responsible for making the government more transparent, accessible, responsive. Like the Internet-savvy Obama election machine, this President-elect wants to stream meetings live which are held between cabinet ministers and business CEOs or their organizations; he wants to post on government websites legislation for five days to solicit public comments; he wants to provide other interactive policy sites, chat rooms and forums so that citizens can participate in governance and he wants to streamline or convert government departments and their websites into efficient service-providers.
3. Extend broadband access to all Americans, up from the 23% which now can tap into the Internet and its vast store of information or services. The U.S. ranks 15th in the world in this regard, according to the OECD.
4. The CTO will interface and lobby for more open immigration policies to attract more of the world’s brainpower to its government-funded research projects.
5. Obama’s America will earmark money to upgrade and computerize the country’s education system.
6. His plans include cleaning up the patent protection and copyright processes to end frivolous and vexatious litigation as well as “trolling” or tweaking existing protections to create new, invasive ones.
America will dominate innovationIt’s an ambitious agenda and very much on the mind of Obama’s generation of younger people who got out of the vote and will want to continue to have a say during governance, as was the case during the campaign.
At the same time as transforming government through transparency and access and interactivity, the Obama ambition is to foster America’s greatest strength which is innovation and invention.
This is not going to be a government which broadcasts and delegates power, but Obama’s post-politics platform is going to be a Manhattan-project designed to truly bring about government by the people and for the people.
It’s ambitious and will only succeed if the CTO is an inspired choice and the normal governmental impediments are removed with the help of Congress.
One touted to be a potential candidate is Lawrence Lessig, a brilliant digital age scholar who I have met at conferences in the U.S. He is founder of Stanford University’s Center for the Internet and Society. He believes the creation of a CTO is inspired.
“I do think the CTO could be a critically important position, from deciding how to make government more efficient and transparent through technology, to helping advance public policy questions like those surrounding global warming,” he said in a recent interview with an American periodical.
A cabinet-level CTO position would be more lofty and powerful than the presidential science advisor and may be the most important economic and business initiative undertaken by the Obama Team. It could, if successful, insure that the United States will remain the world’s pre-eminent high-tech nation.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2008/11/07/second-thoughts.aspx----------------------------------------------------------------
All sounds good to me!
