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Photo by Brian Solis (2009), CC-BY. He presumably looks a little older now.

This is somewhat old news. My colleagues and I had quite a lively discussion about it on Friday morning Japan time, but I had no time on Friday. Then I became ill and slept until just now…

This is the Yahoo! Tech news[1] that David had been selected as the White House “director of information technology.” I wonder whether the right Japanese rendering is “Director-General of Information Technology”… According to Wikipedia’s list of U.S. government terminology[2], “Director” apparently corresponds to a director-general… (Could someone knowledgeable tell me?)

He played a central role in establishing the U.S. OpenID® Foundation and served as its first vice chair, and he is also the principal author of OpenID® Authentication 2.0. At the time, he worked at Six Apart and then VeriSign Labs. He later moved to Facebook, where he worked partway through converting Facebook Identity to OAuth 2.0[3], before moving to the Open Compute Project[4], where he also made notable contributions.

He may look middle-aged in the photo, but he is still in his 20s. He is fairly friendly toward Japan. When he visits Japan, we sometimes go out to eat together. His standard attire is a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Once he enters the White House, I wonder whether he will finally start wearing a suit (lol).

According to the White House statement[5], his role at the White House will be:

  • Smarter government IT delivery: ensuring that technology used by the White House is efficient, effective, and secure.
  • Modernizing software for collaboration and introducing new technology aligned with private-sector best practices.

Incidentally, the White House is reportedly requesting in next year’s budget, for digital teams across 25 agencies, $105M (approximately ¥12 billion), so recruitment from Silicon Valley will probably continue.

Everyone’s pay probably goes down, but when they return to the private sector afterward, their salaries rise sharply. So they enter government as part of building their careers. In David’s case as well, the Obama administration has only 2 years remaining, so he probably intends to work in government during that time and then return to the private sector.

In Japan, even if the government is motivated, returning to the private sector afterward seems quite difficult… It is also unclear whether the institutional structure would allow someone to exercise real influence. It is a challenging issue.

 

[1] Alyssa Bereznak, “Exclusive: Facebook Engineering Director Is Headed to the White House”, (2015-03-19), Yahoo! Tech,  https://www.yahoo.com/tech/exclusive-facebook-engineering-director-is-headed-114060505054.html

[2] Wikipedia, List of U.S. Government Terminology http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B1%B3%E5%9B%BD%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C%E7%94%A8%E8%AA%9E%E4%B8%80%E8%A6%A7

[3] The fact that it ultimately stopped there is rather unfortunate… So FB is still at something like OAuth 2.0 draft 10…

[4] Roughly speaking, this is an effort to open up and popularize Google- and Facebook-style servers. http://www.opencompute.org/

[5] Anita Breckenridge, “President Obama Names David Recordon as Director of White House Information Technology”, The White House Blog, (2015-03-19),  https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/19/president-obama-names-david-recordon-director-white-house-information-technology

[6] Mariella Moon, “White House names top Facebook engineer as first director of IT“, Engadget, http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/20/white-house-recordon-facebook-director-it/

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