Front Seat for the Obama CTO Search | TotalPicture Radio - The First Podcast for Career Advancement, Employment Trends, Recruiting, and Leadership Development

Front Seat for the Obama CTO Search

Friday, 14 November 2008

Barack Obama is going to appoint the nation's first CTO. What are the top priorities?

Mike Mathieu

Seattle based Front Seat, a civic software company and incubator, has launched ObamaCTO.org. a feedback forum using a Digg-style voting system to promote the new CTO role in the Obama administration. Anyone can post ideas and "vote" on those already posted. (A couple of my favorites: "Build a nation-wide smart grid" and "Create/support a national IPv6 wired/wireless Internet." As of this posting, the most popular idea, with over 9,500 votes: "Ensure the Internet is widely accessible & network neutral."

Front Seat "works on projects that reflect our values: sustainability, local communities, equal opportunity, and media and government transparency. We look for opportunities where software can accelerate a trend (Walk Score), make public data more transparent (Better Bills), or tell a story (the Predatory Lending Association).

Front Seat was founded by Mike Mathieu, following the successful sale of his Internet publishing company to a private equity firm.

Prior to Front Seat, Mike spent six years as founder and CEO of All Star Directories, an INC 500-listed publisher of online and career school directories. During the 1990's, Mike was General Manager of MSN.com and the MSN Search engine at Microsoft, and helped build Microsoft Excel and Word into the leading office applications. He is a partner and former lead partner in Social Venture Partners, a leading U.S. venture philanthropy network and past Board President of the Technology Access Foundation. He holds a BA, Magna Cum Laude in the History of Science from Harvard University.

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