President's Chief Technology Officer announces new round of Innovation program

"The U.S. Chief Technology Officer is a position that President Obama created when he came to office. It's really about creating and executing projects," explains Todd Park is the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. "One of the initiatives is something called the Open Data Initiatives program. This is a program that essentially seeks to liberate data, in machine readable form, from the vaults of the government as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific discovery."

To help tackle the job of releasing all this new information as well as other big projects, the government launched a program last summer to bring in a group of techies from the business world as so-called Innovation Fellows. "We have been tremendously excited by the success of round one of Presidential Innovation Fellows program, and so we are very excited today to be launching round two," says Park. "We've actually identified a set of game-changing projects to apply technology to do massive public good. We are going to market with those projects and then seeking the best people on the planet to come and serve in government working on those projects." Park's team will be accepting applications for the next six weeks.