Regardless of Bill Joy's qualifications, this is difficult to accept considering Bill Joy is a partner at John Doerr's firm. I'm not at all opposed to the idea of a national CTO, but this article appears to be a blatant attempt on the part of this firm to cozy up to a new administration. Any advice that primarily benefits the one giving the advice should be taken with a grain of salt. That's not to say Bill Joy is not qualified, but I have no doubt there are other equally qualified candidates available. I'm surprised this would even be posted here.
I like the idea of a CTO advisory position and Bill Joy should be on the short list.<p>As to Chief Security Officer, I can't think of anyone that belongs on the list besides Bruce Schneier. In fact, can we just give the FTA and Homeland Security positions to Schneier for a few months to let him write sensible rules for security? He already has most of the rational documented.<p>I do not like the idea of a CIO under-secretary, or whatever. A CIO trying to pull together "cost-saving" across government agencies would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Best to have gov agencies start to operate more agile on their own.<p>As a side note, Kleiner's flying a Turkish flag on his new sailing toy may raise awareness about how the rich offshore money and avoid taxes (yes, I do understand how high luxury yacht taxes are and that this is standard practice). Doerr may want to be careful about not attracting too much attention to his friends that make most their income on capital gains ;).
It is hard to name good candidates for such a position unless/until the job description is known. Does technology = computers? If so, Bill Joy is a great choice. But what if it emphasizes engineering, or science, or medicine (or sub-disciplines of them)? Or all of them - how many polymaths are in the market right now? And how many of them want to work for the Govt?