Many people in the general public know him as “the Indian George Clooney,” thanks to a funny Jon Stewart segment a couple years ago.
But Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. chief technology officer, is in charge of some pretty serious and important stuff — particularly when it comes to opening up government data for public benefit, through initiatives including the Open Government Directive. Tim O’Reilly explained the philosophy well in an interview with Chopra last year: Government should be a platform provider, not an application provider — not solving all of the nation’s problems but creating capabilities that the nation can use to solve its problems.
Chopra will be discussing those topics and others during a two-day visit to the Seattle region next week, highlighted by an appearance at the Technology Alliance 2011 State of Technology Luncheon on Tuesday. (Look for coverage on GeekWire.) He’ll also be participating in a series of roundtables with local companies and organizations on topics including cloud computing, customer relations and global health.
Should be an interesting visit.
And for the record, he took the whole “Daily Show” thing with good humor.
