Your 01.16.08 Federal CTO reader: Word next week?

Ending the week with even more speculation about the Obama CTO post — something we’ve been following a whole bunch. (See here about one big name coming off the CTO list… and here about some of the previous speculation.

BusinessWeek has a story today about the Obama CTO — and they are hearing that there are two candidates for the Obama CTO — Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Silicon Valley networking giant Cisco Systems, and, of course, Vivek Kundra, the DC CTO — both of whom are Indian born.

Warrior, who previously was CTO at Motorola, represents hard-core technology expertise. Kundra, who was named to the D.C. post in 2007, has held similar government positions in the past and has a reputation for using technology to make government more open and inclusive. Neither the Obama transition team nor the two executives would comment on their potential selection by Obama.

The President-elect is expected to announce his pick for CTO in a matter of days. One of the sources says the selection is being held up because it’s not yet clear how the person selected asCTO will interact with the government’s chief information officer, a position now held by Karen Evans, and with the new cyber-security czar, another position that has not yet been filed.

Read the BusinessWeek post here.

I’m hearing that too — that Team Obama is still ferreting out precisely what they want that position to be and how it will interact within OMB — and CIOs. The speculation currently is that the Obama CTO simply won’t have that much heft. In fact, I mentioned that I spoke at the Social Media Club DC chapter this week about government 2.0 and the subject of the CTO came up — and  there was divergent opinion on the role of the CTO. Mark Drapeau, a associate research fellow at the National Defense University, argued that there was no need for the CTO at all. And, in fact, he suggested that he hadn’t heard anybody define what the CTO would do. And, while I have enormous amount of respect for Drapeau, I just couldn’t disagree more. There has been a whole lot of conversation around the role of the CTO. On Federal News Radio’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris, we have had a whole bunch of folks talk about the CTO job — everybody from Don Tapscott and Andrew McAfee to Drapeau himself. Personally I think that the CTO will actually be a true chief information officer because, in the end, that’s where they can make the different and that is what matters — focusing on the information.

More on the Social Media Club and the AFFIRM government 2.0 sessions over the weekend.

And if you know anything about Warrior, let me know.

Still don’t get Twitter? A radio explainer on Friday

Twitter — a funny name that you keep hearing out there? But what is it? How does it work? And even if you understand that it 140-character posts that answers the question, ‘What are you doing right now?’ why would anybody care?

I have done a few posts trying to explain what Twitter is… and how Twitter works. (See here… and here…) I also have posted several posts on interesting uses of Twitter. (See the FEMA Twitter-conference… and the Twitter vote report… for example.) But… we’re going to do a radio explainer today on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose program. We are going to walk people through how one uses Twitter, but also why people use Twitter. I am tappoing some expertise to help me here — Chris Rasmussen, who is a knowledge manager and trainer for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency — part of the team that created Intellipedia. (Profile here… When I was at Federal Computer Week, I had Rasmussen on my Federal News Radio program. See that here.)

After the break, I’ll have some relevant links — people in government that you can follow to help build your network, some written how-to’s, some video how-to’s.

I have been using Twitter for… well, awhile now. At first, I didn’t really get it. ‘Why does anybody do this? Who cares what I’m doing.’ The big challenge in my mind is building a network of peole who talk about shared areas of interest — and it is the weakest part of Twitter: There isn’t a really good way to find people on Twitter.

If you have issues you’d like us to discuss, post them here… or on Twitter, where I am @cdorobek.

After the break… some links that cover Twitter.