Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities?

ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted. ObamaCTO.org just went live, so the number of participants is pretty small, but my guess is it will get a lot of participation soon. Some of the ideas being posted aren't really the responsibility of a potential CTO, however, and it's not clear how the site's managers will filter those out.

Matt Lerner, one of the site's developers, says it's just one of a series of "civic software" sites his company, FrontSeat.org, has built in the last year. "Our most popular site is www.walkscore.com, which promotes walkable neighborhoods. In general, we're trying to use software to enhance civic participation." Lerner says he "wasn't involved directly in the Obama campaign other than donating time/money, working on the election site www.countmore.org [which sought to help college students determine whether they should vote from their home or school address], and dancing in the streets when Obama won."

Next up and out this morning: a very meaty discussion of the role of the CTO and information policy generally was just released by the 21st Century Right to Know Project, which was organized by OMB Watch and represents nearly two years of work and hundreds of hours of public and private consultation with a wide range of experts. The 99-page document is ironically only up on the web as a .pdf (I'm told an .html document is coming soon), but it is well worth a read. The Washington Post covers its release here.

The Right to Know report ranges across the whole spectrum of government information policies, and includes a detailed discussion on how and why to reverse the Bush Administration's tightfisted approach towards FOIA requests and secrecy classifications. Regarding the role of the CTO, the report recommends that:

"The CTO should lead efforts to standardize technology policy for public access across the government and within agencies. Specifically the position should be tasked with the following goals:
-Data standards for sharing information, interagency reporting, open programming.
-Open programming interface policy.
-Transparency and dissemination
-Control privacy and identity theft
-Security of system
-Procurement (to have coherency)
-Contract review
-Technical capacity
-Interagency coordination (and intergovernmental)
-Data quality

The report calls for the CTO to work closely with the existing E-Government Administrator, to "develop coherent technology and procurement strategies across the federal government for a wide range of purposes, including government openness." It also makes a push for the creation of a Government Transparency Officer to oversee implementation of a wide-ranging executive order calling for more robust disclosure of everything from who is lobbying the government to the details of who is getting what in return, and where government appointees worked before and after their jobs in government.

As for bringing web 2.0 thinking into government, the Right to Know report is chock full of details. Recommendation D.3 looks like my favorite. It reads:

"The president, through his CTO and E-Government Administrator, should encourage agencies to implement interactive and transparent Web 2.0 technologies. The government faces the same challenges and opportunities in online contexts as citizens do -- that citizens and government can share ideas and information to create more effective governance, but only through proactive engagement in online projects and communities. Administrators whould clearly encourage agencies to recognize the public as partners in effective governance, setting up pilot projects in citizen production and collaboration, and urging a culture of transparency and disclosure. Wikis, comment sections, collaborative projects, public review of pending policies, and online dialogs are all relatively simple ways to start experimenting online."

The report also recommends overhauling the regulations.gov website to make it consumer-friendly, presenting information about the federal budget so that users can track proposals and changes through the process, allowing agencies and government employees "to use the same open, free, commercial services that citizens use without the necessity of a special government contract" (Let Our Bureaucrats Tweet!), widespread adoption of APIs and other syndication of government information to the public, and making agency websites distribute data in open formats that would be accessible to all search engines.

[Full disclosure: I am, along with Andrew Rasiej, this site's co-founder, a senior technology advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which was one of the funders and participants in the Right to Know report.]