How The U.S. Chief Technology Officer Is Making Data Awesome

Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, gave the audience at the 2012 Social Good Summit on Saturday a high-energy lesson in the importance of making government data more useful and available to anyone.

Park, who previously served as Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, became the White House’s second CTO in March of this year.

“We’ve really embraced the power of open innovation,” said Park, who broke his job down into three primary tasks: making new data available to the public; taking already publicly available data that’s unusable and making it usable; and making entrepreneurs and innovators aware of government data.