That's what I'm talking about... it will take a decade or more, but this is the future of governance.
E http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2519B930-808E-45D4-BDC1-F98C063ACBA0 Incoming CTO talks startups at SXSW - POLITICO.com Print View AUSTIN, Texas — The man tapped by President Barack Obama to be the White House’s next tech-expert-in-residence got rave reviews — and a standing ovation — from tech junkies here at South by Southwest. Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, will become the next federal CTO, Obama announced Friday. Park, who replaces Aneesh Chopra, will be the second person to hold the position that Obama created when he came into office. Park officially starts his new gig next Friday, and it seems the transition is well under way. Along with Macon Phillips, White House director of digital strategy, Park gave an energetic rundown of his HHS projects with the same oomph you’d expect from a new CEO pitching his startup to a room of investors. The federal government, he said, is chock-full of would-be entrepreneurs who just need a leader to give them permission to execute their ideas. The best entrepreneurs are driven by the “all the incredible excitement” about what they were building — not the stock options and fame. “It turns out that in the federal government, there are a lot of innovators” driven by the same excitement, Park said in his first public appearance since his new appointment. “They’re certainly not there for the stock options.” Park knows about what it takes to get a startup off the ground. In 1997, he co-founded athenahealth, a health information technology company that later went public. He also served as a senior health care adviser to Ashoka, an incubator of social entrepreneurs. His experience gives him street cred in a place like SXSW, where scrappy startups, Web enthusiasts and social media mavens gather to talk shop and swap strategies. In the government, “there’s incredible raw material” that can be put to use “to get stuff done that’s good for the American people,” he said. “There are a bunch of kickass innovators there. Our job as leaders is to find those innovators and release their mojo — lean startup-style — to serve the American people better.” During his nearly three years at HHS, one of his biggest projects was to release government health data, such as hospital ratings, to the public so software developers could create applications that could help improve public health. Now all HHS agencies are required to have in place a “data liberation plan” to release more information sets. Park also led the creation of Healthcare.gov, which lets citizens find and compare available health insurance plans and was part of the health care reform law. “The last two years have been the most entrepreneurial experience of my life,” he said. “I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector — go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources. “Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it’s the most effective way to drive change in the federal government,” he said. This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:54 a.m. on March 11, 2012. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
