America’s CTO
As Obama reaches the inevitable (our next President), people are talking more and more about his specific ideas and how his “computer savvy” and “youngness” are really going to (probably) see alot of changes in policy. Most recently, people have been talking about his promise to create a position that amounts to “CTO of America”, someone who would watch and govern over the interests of American technology and Net Neutrality, as well as help bring the antiquated government policies into the real and modern world.
Scoble recently promoted his list of potential candidates, and why he ultimately thinks Lawrence “Founder of Creative Commons” Lessig would be a perfect fit. Duncan Riley took a different position, and is behind Dave “Father of RSS” Winer. Personally? I have two opinions on this.
- I’m glad Scoble’s name has never come up in these conversations. Believe it or not, he actually didn’t even nominate himself - completely out of character. We need to avoid the PR echo chamber “Internet celebrities”, because not only are they not savvy enough to lead government policy on bleeding-edge technology, but they would probably make the position a joke by acting as if it were a blog. Who really wants to see the CTO promoting Twitter or some idiotic Facebook app? Not me. So that means we need to avoid:
- Robert “Smiling Ego” Scoble
- Michael “PR Aggregator” Arrington
- Jason “Annoying Failtrepreneur” Calacanis
- Kevin “Why Is He Famous?” Rose
- Meg “Destroyed Ebay” Whitman
- etc.
- We need someone young enough to be “hip” with the times, bleeding edge enough to be relevant, but also someone old (and intelligent) enough to ignore the majority of the current stream of trash across the Internet. Here’s some of my choices:
- Brad “EFF Troublemaker” Templeton — [his blog]
- Lawrence “Destroy Traditional Copyright” Lessig — [his site]
- Peter “Visionary Extraordinaire” Norvig — [his site]
- Chris “Open Source Advocate” Messina — [his blog]
- William “Internet Visionary, Father of Cyberpunk” Gibson — [his blog]
- Tim “Bleeding Edge Advocate” O’Reilly — [his site]
- Tim “Father of the Internet” Berners-Lee — [his blog]
I know, that’s a pretty long and across-the-board list, but I think they’re actually viable candidates. I obviously left out people like Linus “Gatekeeper of Linux” Torvalds because they are so anti-politics and have such an inflammatory personality that they aren’t even options.
— — —
Update (8/23/2008 5:10pm PST): I got a response via email from Peter Norvig. His thoughts? “Thanks. I’d probably go for Bruce Schneier, Jim Fruchterman, Eric Brewer, Dave Patterson.” I’d have to say I agree with him on Schneier and Patterson, actually.
Update (8/23/2008 5:25pm PST): Lawrence Lessig just responded via email as well, disputing my label as “Destroy Copyright”. In all honesty, I mean that as “traditional copyright”, so I’ve modified it to reflect the real meaning. Sorry Lawrence!
Update (8/23/2008 9:15pm PST): Tim O’Reilly emailed back, with suggestions of Brian Behlendorf and Ray Ozzie. Good suggestions.
