The White House has hired a third high-profile Google exec to join President Obama’s team, and this one looks to be the most influential appointment yet..
In what could prove to be a spearhead appointment for open standards and potentially open source, a senior Google director has become Deputy Chief Technology Officer to the US.
Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of global public policy, previously worked in the Obama/Biden presidential transition team and before his time at Google served as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer of
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
Now he takes up the 2IC job at President Obama’s newly-created CTO team, which is charged with “promoting technological innovation to help the country meet its goals (and) to make the government more effective, efficient, and transparent.”
President Obama has also stressed that the focus of the CTO will range from infrastructure and policies to Government-provided services.
The White House also counts former Google product manager Katie Stanton as its Director of Citizen Participation. Stanton led the team that created Google Moderator, which applies crowdsourcing to rank user-submitted questions and was used by Obama’s transition team in a series of online Q&A sessions with the public in December 2008.
Sonal Shah, who worked for Google’s philanthropy division Google.org, helped oversee those technology angles of the transition team and later joined the administration as Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
The White House also has Google CEO Eric Schmidt on tap in his role as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.