Supernova Interview: Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO, USA

Today at the Personal Democracy Forum event, US CIO Vivek Kundra announced the first “IT Dashboard” for manipulating data about how US taxpayer’s dollars are spent. (Good coverage at the NY Observer.)  After Kundra and new media director of the White House Macon Phillips left the PDF stage, Beth Noveck, Deputy US CTO for the Open Government initiative spoke with PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej about her project. Noveck, the author of Wiki Government, has the rare opportunity of proposing a major change in public policy in a book and implementing it just months later. Using wiki-like collaborative tools like Mixed Ink and Idea Scale, her office is putting “we the people” into the drivers seat to answer questions like  “How can we strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative?”

In this video interview, I ask Beth about these initiatives and about her vision for future “We.gov” initiatives.

We hope Beth will engage with the Supernova Hub audience, and that in turn our audience will join in her open process.

Supernova Interview with Chris Sacca, Lowercase Capital

I got a few minutes with Chris Sacca after his talk (with Wyclef Jean - note video may not safe for work due to language) at the 140 Characters Conference in New York last week.

Chris is both an early and late stage investor, and has invested in Photobucket and Twitter among many others. He also headed special initiatives at Google and advised the Obama campaign. (There’s more of a profile about Chris at Crunchbase.)

In this discussion he talks about several of his investments, including Twitter, phone service company Twillio, stealth-mode company Small Batch and more. He notes that all of these are enabled by the ability to host the sites in the cloud, and scale without needing to own their own infrastructure.

We hope to hear more from Chris at the Supernova conference this winter.