You can help with one of the most important public policy issues of our times
I’m pretty passionate about electronic freedom these days.
Issues of privacy and liberty take at least five forms:
- Censorship
- Admissible evidence in court
- Admissible evidence in investigations (not exactly the same thing)
- The consequences of damaging information leaks from the government to the private sector
- Potential chill on useful technologies (e.g., electronic health records) caused by any of the other four kinds of issue
Taken together, that amounts to much of the Bill of Rights – or other countries’ equivalents — plus a whole lot of life-saving technology on the side. I.e., it’s more than huge.
That’s from a detailed recent post that ends with a call to action:
Please join me in raising awareness. Blog yourself. Send email to those who might have influence. Or – and this one’s really easy – just go to the suggestion page at www.change.gov and help draw the incoming Administration’s attention toward these crucial issues.
Please, please do at least one of those things. There’s still enough time for freedom to be preserved, since the worst practical threats are still some years off. But if it doesn’t happen during an Obama Administration, when will it happen, in the United States or the rest of the world? The time to make a difference is now.
I’ll be on DC-area radio Monday 11/17. An MP3 will be available.
I am to be interviewed at 7:28 am Monday 11/17 on Federal News Radio, AM 1500 in the DC area. That’s also an internet radio station. The producer writes:
We’ll zap this interview to the entire Maryland/VA/DC tri-state area. We’ll also stream it live at federalnewsradio.com. And afterwards, we’ll archive it online in its entirety (MP3 format).
Hopefully I’ll get a more precise link to the archive once it’s up, in which case I plan to edit it into this post.
The subject is what Obama should look for in a CTO, and what the Obama Administration’s technology priorities should be. This interview was surely triggered by my post arguing the new United States CTO needs to be more of a CIO, and the Slashdotting of same.
Related links
- MP3 of the interview
- My rant rebutting the attitudes represented by the interviewers 🙂
- Freedom even without data privacy
| Categories: Monash Research highlights, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market
For the first time in ages, I put up a Monash Advantage Members-only Monash Letter at www.monashadvantage.com. Passwords can be obtained from my principal contacts at each Member. (If you can’t guess who that is at your company, please feel free to contact me directly.)
The subject is Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market. (Aka data warehouse DBMS, data warehouse appliance, analytic appliance, or whatever.) I proposed eight ideas that I think work, but they overlap a lot – four are variants on “great price/performance” and three are variants on “the safe choice.” I also called out a few that I don’t think work, including at least one that one of my clients is pretty much betting the company on.
Obviously, there’s a huge amount of research backing up this analysis over on DBMS2. (Just one example – my recent Teradata product line overview.) But I also invoked some underlying marketing theory. Part of that has been posted on Strategic Messaging. Other exists only in very crude draft form. (Sadly, that’s what my whole company website used to look like, until Melissa Bradshaw rescued it.)
| Categories: Monash Research highlights | Leave a Comment |
Who should Obama appoint as United States CTO/CIO?
During the campaign, Barack Obama promised to appoint a national Chief Technology Officer. Naturally, vigorous discussion has ensued as to who that should be. I’ve been right in the thick of it:
- Arguing that the CTO should really be a CIO, in line with Obama’s own description of the job. (That got Slashdotted.)
- Discussing which direct responsibilities the United States CTO/CIO actually should have.
- Recommending former IRS Commissoner and American Management Systems CEO Charles Rossotti for the job, both because of his accomplishments and his honesty. (Rossotti emailed me implying that he wasn’t interested. I shot back that this was the first time in our quarter-century acquaintance I didn’t precisely believe what he said.)
- Outlining my recommended list of Obama Administration IT priorities.
Much of the blogosphere and trade press discussion started out silly, speculating on Eric Schmidt for the job and so on. Richard Koman was one of the first to analyze the subject more sensibly. But now Dan Farber has weighed in with a great post, looking at the practicalities of the position in detail, which was quickly echoed by his old partner Larry Dignan.
Getting Federal IT straight is a VERY difficult job. It’s also utterly crucial. I hope the Obama Administration gets it right.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 5 Comments |
Technology highlights of the 2008 US Presidential campaign
I’ve been writing quite a bit over on A World of Bytes about the technology used in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Subjects included:
- A brilliant viral get-out-the-vote video (from MoveOn.org, actually, not the Obama campaign as I first thought). What was so innovative about it was the personalization inside the video. This is one to learn from in your own business.
- Obama campaign successes and failures at local targeting (that one also has links to a number of other posts on technology-in-the-campaign).
- Two appallingly dishonest site-specific search boxes.
I’m also writing over there about what I think the Obama Administration should do with respect to technology policy. First up is a ringing recommendation of Charles Rossotti for CIO/CTO. More to follow.