Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO, Education Technology Visionary, Delights Audience at City Club in Cleveland, OH

July 12, 2009

On Friday, I watched 37-year old Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, speak at an event at The City Club (podcast). Aneesh is a rock star and his education technology ideas are precisely what we need in Ohio and the country.

There were several organizations hosting tables including: Asian Indian American Community, Case Western Reserve University, Centric Consulting Company, Hatch, Medical Mutual of Ohio, MOCA Cleveland, Morino Ventures, OneCommunity, TiE Ohio, and University Hospitals.

Aneesh is the former Secretary of Technology of Virginia, and clearly understands the role of technology in improving outcomes in health care, education, and energy. Tim O Reilly provides some specific examples of why Aneesh is such a strong technology leader.

Aneesh focused on 3 important areas of managing the country’s technology strategy:

  • He aims to create game changing innovation in the fields of health care, education, energy, and economic growth.
  • He wants to build a 21st century infrastructure in terms of broadband, energy, and cyber security.
  • He wishes to improve the efficiency of government.

Chopra’s framework for managing innovation is to evaluate all new ideas on the formula: Innovation=function(ideas, relevance). This article does a good job of diving into his application of this model for managing innovation in Virginia.

It is somewhat easy to “talk a good game” on long-term technology plans to change the country. But Aneesh’s approach in Virginia, and his approach in Washington seem to also give a lot of attention to short-term cost-effective solutions.

He also recently gave a talk (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4) in Washington DC at the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA). At 1:00 in Part 4, there is a question about increasing funding for education technology.

Aneesh’s response is awesome because he was not trying to feed the audience what they wanted to hear. Instead, Aneesh describes how technology can be leveraged in ways that do not cost a lot of money:

These systems need not be expensive. I want to give you some context. Analytics and data are increasingly free on Web 2.0 capacities all over the internet. Governor Kaine took office in January 2006 and one of his top priorities was to improve Small Business, Minority, and Women Contractors. We will figure this thing out. We grabbed an open-source tool, and put some people on our staff who are smart, and gave them 3 months to put on a public data platform of every nickel of governor spending categorized, reported, and sliced diced in every way. It went live in march 06, and by March 08, it had exceeded…everyone’s expectations.


My view has also been that there is enough funding for education technology, but schools may not be utilizing their funding efficiently. Some examples of taking education technology dollars further include utilizing a shared services approach to technology management, thin client technology, free Web 2.0 technologies, productivity habits, and leveraging E-rate funding.

Aneesh also spoke about creating a Ning space to provide rural doctors a tool for sharing best practices on reducing obesity, increasing immunization, and other state initiatives.

This sounds similar to the Ohio Education Technology Network (OETN) initiative in Ohio. Unfortunately, OETN has been given limited support by the State of Ohio or Ohio Department of Education. It would be wonderful to see Ohio or Cleveland create specific metrics and uses for leveraging existing Web 2.0 technologies in their governing. New platforms are not needed and instead, we should leverage existing online tools to accomplish our policy goals.

Aneesh is a strong advocate of government’s role for increasing open standards and data portability. I too believe that there is a need to create an “Open Mesh” in Education. As an aside, the famous technology visionary, Marc Canter,  is moving to Cleveland to apply his Open Mesh principles to improving Work Force Development and creating a digital dashboard for Northeast Ohio. Aneesh and Marc Canter seem to be advocating for similar goals:

[Aneesh] said rather than work unilaterally, local governments and institutions should collaborate and share information so the community can help come up with creative solutions. He said the federal government aims to lead by example, by cutting through slow-moving bureaucracy to adopt new technologies faster.


Aneesh has also expressed support for open source curriculum and broadband in rural communities. I strongly believe that open-source textbooks and curriculum could be a game-changing disruptive innovation in the education sector.

On bandwidth, I never completely understood OneCommunity and Lev Gonick’s push to increase the bandwidth in Northeast Ohio. Before this luncheon, I viewed broadband connectivity as an expensive way to push unnecessary platforms such as  Second Life and Virtual Worlds through the pipe. While I am still not completely convinced that increasing connectivity in Northeast Ohio is the best use of our precious philanthropic and local government funding, I have now tempered my opinions on this topic.

Overall, I am impressed with the depth of thinking of our Federal CTO, and feel confident that he will dramatically move the country forward technologically in the upcoming years.

Posted by Nitin | Filed Under Blog 

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