Though President Obama has yet to announce a CTO, he has announced his choice for Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra.  His choice is a promising one, given Kundra’s fantastic success as CTO for Washington D.C. For example, he saved the city millions by switching off Microsoft’s Office platform and onto Google’s Apps platform for desktop productivity and even crowdsourced technology solutions for the city, saving even more millions in development fees.

O’Reilly has a great summation of audio and video clips describing what Kundra has to say.  Viewing them has given me great hope for the US and our amazing leader who can recognize innovative talent in this traditionally unfathomable space.

My own thoughts and ideas on what “sustainability” really means have now begun to be articulated, far more eloquently than I ever could, in Tim O’Reilly’s post, “Work on Stuff That Matters.” His First Principles are:

1. Work on something that matters to you more than money.
2. Create more value than you capture.
3. Take the long view.

Reading Calacanis’ popular and excellent post on “The Future of Startups,” and more and more announcements like the one Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh, gave to his employees last week, has given me the feeling we still have not yet seen the bottom of this particular barrel.  Thus, I do not envy President-elect Obama.  Though I doubt it is ever easy to lead a large organization or country, to lead the U.S. right now is most likely the hardest job on the planet given the death spiral we are in.

There are so many important issues to address, how does one choose and make sure one’s actions are successful.  Looking at the list of “agenda” items on Change.gov, it is a daunting task.  My guess would be the economy and the war are top of everyone’s list given their far reaching causes and effects. (As a sidenote, I see here, that someone is finally making some sense on the proposed automakers’ bailout.)

Two issues close to my heart and, in my opinion, the most important to our future success as a viable country, are the Environment and Technology.

During this week’s Governor’s Global Climate Summit, Obama sent along an inspiring vidcast of his objectives for this agenda item, the highlights of which include:

• Federal cap and trade system
• Target 1990 emissions levels by 2020, 80% reduction by 2050
• $15b/year investment
• Create 5 million green jobs

Given the response at the conference, these kinds of far-reaching, specific targets are just what we need to make a difference.  His environmental team is also saying the right things, especially by seeing the need to work across traditional government silo’s in order for programs to work.

As for technology, Obama will be the first U.S. president to understand the power of “being digital,” and how it can return power to the people and trust in government.  It is my sincere hope that rather than giving up his Blackberry, he instead pulls our government into the 21st century by making the necessary changes to antiquated rules and regulations, appointing a cabinet-level CTO and driving an appropriately open technology platform upon which we are all able to make our voices heard and be effective in fixing all that is broken together.  The BBC has a nice summary of the issues and great comments from some of the visionaries in the field, like O’Reilly and Battelle.

In order to rise from the ashes, we must make significant progress on these fronts.  They are the source of new jobs, new ideas and a sustainable way for us to exist.  The question is how…

Cloud computing has been steadily gaining momentum and validity in meeting enterprise needs and this latest global experiment from HP, Yahoo, Intel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE) and Infocomm Development Authority (SG) should prove interesting to watch.

The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.

The project’s large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

Tim O’Reilly is concerned that though we may move into the cloud for all the right reasons, we will still use the old architectures and lock everyone in as we did with ERPs and other proprietary applications.

…the success of the internet as a non-proprietary platform built largely on commodity open source software could lead to a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud. What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage? How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition?

The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc.

How do we ensure openness and interoperability prevail at the end of the day?  Seemingly irrelevant for something referring to clouds, but no less important to cloud computing’s success, how too do we ensure the right locations for the physical manefestations of the cloud?