Senate Sources Say CTO Confirmation a Done Deal 111
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?"
Chopra and the importance of intellectual property (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com] 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.