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Aneesh Chopra Announced as Nation’s First CTO
News leaked Friday that Aneesh Chopra, Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, has been appointed the first federal CTO. President Obama made the official announcement Saturday.
While working in Virginia, Chopra lead a highly successful effort to ramp up broadband deployment around the state, which Nancy Scola chronicled in her feature, “Broadband Done Right.” Creative public-private partnerships, as well as funds from the Virginia Tobacco Commission, fueled a variety of projects that wired rural areas from the mountains to the Chesapeake Bay.
In addition to creating opportunities for telework and more tech-based jobs, Chopra also focused on the importance of ubiquitious broadband for providing health care. From Scola’s article:
More critically, Chopra describes demanding medical- records software deployed at health centers serving Virginia’s neediest areas that can’t survive the dial-up link. “People are literally dying because they can’t get the broadband they need to run the software,” He explains. Cutting-edge software applications may demand enormous pipe, but today even successful surfing calls for 200Kbps.
For a thorough roundup of Chopra’s experience and qualifications (including an arguement why a former government official is a better choice here than a Silicon Valley veteran), see Tim O’Reilly’s post at O’Reilly Radar. His verdict: “Aneesh Chopra is a rock star.”
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