"We've got to recognize that we can't treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas," Kundra was quoted as saying by Government Computer News writer Wyatt Kash today. "We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country. The federal government doesn't have a monopoly on the best ideas." That's exciting, if it's more than just words.

Can They Do It?

Collaboration is best built on a foundation of trust and transparency, something the technology players in the new administration have had a mixed record on in its first few months in office.

Transparency advocates celebrated the launch in March of a Digg-like social voting site to bring up key issues for the White House to tackle. Last month's unveiling of the new data.gov central repository for public data was less exciting in its execution. The congressional hearing on the confirmation of Kundra's co-worker to be, Chief Technology Officer nominee, Aneesh Chopra, was outright appalling in its failure to address issues of transparency.

Thus, when Kundra says that "we can't treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas," we hope that co-creation will be recognized as an active collaboration between equally valid parties - not only as an opportunity to "mine" or "crowdsource" the public for ideas in bulk.

Concerns aside, it is certainly interesting to live at a time when the US Federal Government calls using the kinds of online tools that geeks in their parents' basements came up with, co-creation of ideas with the American people.

Thanks to leading Enterprise 2.0 consultant Dion Hinchcliffe for catching and spreading the word about this news.

Last month, two Virginia congressmen recommended Chopra for the job, saying "Chopra's public and private experience in the technology field made him the right candidate," and pointed out his focus on healthcare IT "is ideal for a position that will have responsibilities dealing both with stimulus spending on healthcare and environmental programs."

"I have named Jeffrey Zients, a leading CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur, to serve as Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget and as the first ever Chief Performance Officer. Jeffrey will work to streamline processes, cut costs, and find best practices throughout our government.

Aneesh Chopra, who is currently the Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, has agreed to serve as America's Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities - from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure.

Aneesh and Jeffrey will work closely with our Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, who is responsible for setting technology policy across the government, and using technology to improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs. The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we're spending their money - and can hold us accountable for the results."

Tim O'Reilly, the man who coined the term Web 2.0, claims that Chopra has been instrumental in helping him better understand Government 2.0 and how technology can be utilized to build a better government. He offers eight reasons why Chopra is an excellent choice as Federal CTO.

We've embedded a video of the keynote Aneesh Chopra gave at this year's State of the Net Conference earlier this year to give you an insight into the thoughts of our new CTO. In this 50 minute talk, Chopra discusses health IT, broadband policy and open education among other things.

Kundra became "web 2.0 famous" last Fall when as D.C. CTO he switched 38,000 District of Colombia government employees off of Microsoft Office and onto Google apps instead. What kinds of crazy moves could he make as the government's CIO? We can only imagine.

We noticed that Kundra's bio page on the D.C. government's website was removed this week but remains in Google's cache.

See Jobwire, our site covering new hires in tech, for our extended coverage of the likely forthcoming announcement.

Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. Most see that Social Media technology has positive potential. But they do have legitimate concerns. Specifically, social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries:

1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app. The viral nature of adoption is a concern for people who have to ensure that the lights are on and the trains run on time. If you are asking people to do serious business on your service, you have to be solid on the reliability and performance scores.

2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped. It is virtually impossible to stop an employee, either foolishly or maliciously, sending digital data that should not be sent. Just make sure that your service does not make this worse and has some reasonable controls.

3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards. Without integration you cannot answer the next one. Building adapters is tedious work. But once you have a library of them, they become a barrier to entry.

4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.

5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. It is also a legitimate concern that if you give a lot of powerful social media tools to people who don't know how to use them wisely, there will be a lot of collateral damage. Like physicians you need to show that your service will "do no harm".

These are all negative, objection issues. Clearly there needs to be a compelling positive reason. We will focus on that in a future post. First step is making sure these objections don't stop you on the way in.

If you want to listen directly to one CIO who is thinking hard about this, see this podcast by Intel CIO John "JJ" Johnson on social media in the enterprise.

What have you experienced? As a vendor, have you found and handled these or other issues? As a customer, have Social Media start-ups shown a good understanding of these issues? What other issues are critical?