Outgoing federal CTO talks transparency, bottom-up change

As the first ever federal chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, who steps down this week, was responsible for advising the President on technology and innovation. In a lengthy interview published earlier this week, Chopra spoke with The Atlantic's Nancy Scola:

What is the elevator pitch on what you've been doing since you were named U.S. Chief Technology Officer?

What I do is advance the president's innovation agenda by incorporating his bottom-up theory of change. To be very specific about it, I execute the president's innovation strategy in a manner that taps into the expertise of the American people to solve big problems.

The White House's Open Government Initiative focuses on three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Can you rate the progress that has been made on each thus far?

I'm the wrong person to grade them, but I will rank them. That might be safer. We've seen great results in transparency, and we have absolutely delivered. It's never enough, for sure, but I'm very pleased with our experience opening up data. We've seen wide-spread adoption of publishing data [in the executive branch]. I'm, ah, excited about the prospects of collaboration, because so much of the open innovation story is built on collaboration and the idea that to solve the big challenges of our time, we're going to have to tap into the expertise of the American people. In the markets where we've focused, we've seen results -- they just haven't scaled across government. And on participation, the arrow is trending up. There were a lot of regulatory and administrative burdens that made it very hard to take advantage of social media and other techniques, but we've spent the last year and a half minimizing the barriers.

You're starting to see that with We the People, the Google "hangout," and the whole range of participatory attributes led by the White House and [Director of Digital Strategy] Macon Phillips. There, we're starting from a smaller base of success, but it has been dramatically scaling in the last several months.

How do you and Steve VanRoekel, U.S. Chief Information Officer, divide up responsibilities on the president's open government portfolio?

Steve's leadership is largely about governing the use of information technology within the walls of government. We spend $80 billion [a year]. We make investments every day. We have failed projects and we have successful projects. His charge is to increase the value for the American taxpayer for the internal IT spend. My focus is how to harness technology, data, and innovation to effect the external world -- hospitals, utilities, schools... They absolutely meet in the middle, because the more that our internal IT systems have the capacity to open up and simplify access to data and other programming tools, the easier it is for the outside world to ingest that information and build products and services. So it's inside ball and outside ball.

Read the full interview here.