Google's Megan Smith reportedly a top candidate for U.S. CTO

Less than a week after Todd Park announced he would be leaving his role as U.S. Chief Technology Officer, potential candidates to fill his role are surfacing.

Bloomberg reported on Aug. 28 that Google's Megan Smith is a top candidate for the CTO role. The White House, which officially announced on Aug 28 that Park would be leaving his role after Fortune broke the news nearly a week prior, has made no indication who will be filling the role.

Smith is a vice president at Google, and currently works on Google X, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's innovation lab. She joined Google in 2003, and has held various roles through her roughly 11-year tenure, including vice president for business development and head of the company’s philanthropic division, Google.org.

Smith has also been involved with Google innovation projects like “Solve for X,” a collaborative online forum where people suggest proposals and work with others to build out ideas. Before coming to Google, she was CEO of Planet Out, a website for gay and lesbian Internet users.

And could Smith bring Park-like enthusiasm and vision to OSTP? In a 2013 Forbes article, she declared: “I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia. What’s exciting is hardware is becoming part of that movement.”