Cloud Driving Change
Those of you that follow me here at the JBGeorge Tech blog or on Twitter or in other ways (stop stalking me!) know that one of my passions is how technology can make a difference in the world. It can be through technology leaders advocating philanthropy, tech innovation leading to medical advances, or a local IT person donating their tech talent to improve school safety.
To that end, I was thrilled to be invited to a meeting that took place in San Francisco yesterday.
On Monday, I, along with a few other select individuals involved in the OpenStack open source cloud initiative, had the distinct privelege of meeting with Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the White House, to discuss cloud computing, open source, and how open source cloud (specifically OpenStack) can help America grow and thrive.
A number of key representatives from various OpenStack participants were present from Dell, Rackspace NASA, Citrix, AMD, and others to contribute to the discussion. There was a lot of great conversation, which included an overview by the OpenStack team from Rackspace, and a myriad of perspectives from the various attendees. Specific problems were discussed such as security, standards, and impact on other areas like healthcare. Much was discussed about OpenStack in particular, and how its evolution can help spur on the American economy.
What are your thoughts on how cloud can better society? How does it impact education, healthcare, or small business? How can it make us healthier, economically more stable, and overall better citizens? Let’s think beyond operating systems and PaaS / SaaS – what can cloud do to help drive positive change?
Regardless of where you fall politcally, it’s a great time to be in technology. The current administration views tech and cloud computing as a key driver to advancing America and rightly so.
And they’re looking to us to help figure out ways to do that.
That’s a real cool thing. Let’s pitch in.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Feel free to drop me a comment or reply on Twitter @jbgeorge.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net
@jbgeorge
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 
JBGeorge,
I’ve been thinking about nothing else since I took sabbatical from NASA last summer, first with the Global Earthquake Model effort in Italy, and since then in discussions with the World Bank and the Google Earth Engine leads.
I’ve registered humanitycloud.net as a placeholder for the sort of non-profit foundation that I’d like to put together – primarily to make sure that data which *should* be publicly available (and in the public domain), remains available.
On the technology front, I’ll be pushing conversations around federation and interoperability of various OpenStack environments – if we’re really to become the “Linux of the Cloud”, then we’re going to need to achieve the same sort of seamless interoperability that email and DNS achieved.
Finally, on the government side, I believe I’ve convinced NASA Ames to host an “OpenStack-FED” meetup, specifically to discuss the extensions necessary to make the OpenStack APIs address the needs of the federal gov’t. This will be a *very small* working-group meeting, specifically to hammer out the sort of low-level details that can be turned into working code.
Joshua McKenty
PS – I’m also launching a new company related to these various efforts. More on that soon.