We just put up a piece about Barack Obama’s still-missing Chief Technology Officer, and how transparency and technology activists are growing pessimistic about a position they once had very high hopes for. Here’s a taste:
While Obama has already given the CTO homework—he or she is tasked with writing recommendations for an Open Government Directive that will implement Obama’s transparency agenda—the position remains unfilled, long after many activists thought it ever would. (As it stands, Obama and his staff are struggling with the White House’s outdated technology.) Last weekend, attendees of the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Camp, a gathering of top members of the open government and technology communities, were genuinely befuddled. None in this tight-knit community could identify the frontrunners for the position, and few had explanations for the delay. Multiple in-the-know sources griped that the CTO will likely be a neutered position, lacking budgetary powers or a direct line to the president, and that the Obama team does not appear to have resolved basic questions, including where the CTO will reside on its organizational chart. (One report suggests the CTO is currently being slated for the president’s Domestic Policy Council.) The general attitude was pessimistic—no one believed that the CTO would be a high-level position capable of improving the use of technology across executive branch departments or of convincing hidebound bureaucracies to use technology to make their operations and decisions more accessible to the public.
Read the whole thing here.
