Monthly Archives: August 2011

How should whistleblowing work in the age of transparency?

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Transparency movements have gone global. Open government, however, depends in part upon the ability of public servants and corporate insiders to blow the whistle on fraud, corruption or other conduct that is not in the interest of citizens or stakeholders. In the context of Wikileaks, the role of whistleblowing has taken on new meaning and scope in this age of transparency. Despite President Obama’s open government commitments, his administration has aggressively pursued whistleblowers over the past two and a half years.

It is in that context that the Advisory Committee on Transparency for the Transparency Caucus in the U.S. Congress hosted a public discussion on July 29, 2011 on the challenges federal whistleblowers face. Video of the hearing, provided courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation, is embedded below.

The panelists included:

  • Angela Canterbury, Director of Public Policy, Project on Government Oversight
  • Carolyn Lerner, Special Counsel, U.S. Office of Special Counsel
  • Christian Sanchez, Border Patrol Agent, Customs & Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security
  • Daniel Schuman, Moderator, Policy Counsel, the Sunlight Foundation
  • Micah Sifry, Co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum; author of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency; Sunlight Foundation sr. technology advisor

People interested in government transparency will find it of considerable interest.

Even if the White House’s commitment to transparency is questioned, open government continues to grow globally, with new tools for transparency coming online every month.

Steven VanRoekel named new federal CIO by White House

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The White House has named former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel and FCC managing director to be the new federal chief information officer of the United States of America, according a report out of the New York Times.

VanRoekel will inherit more than an $80 billion dollar portfolio of federal IT spending from Vivek Kundra, the first federal CIO in the nation’s history.

Over the past year, I’ve written about his progress taking FCC.gov from a long overdue overhaul to reboot as an open government platform, tapong into open source, the cloud, and collective intelligence in the process.

He brought a .com mentality to the FCC, including a perspective that “everything should be an API” that caught some tech observers’ eye. He worked with an innovative new media team that established a voice for social media for the @FCC on social media where that had been none and a FCC.gov/live livestream that automatically detected what device you’d used to access it.

VanRoekel is the man who told me in April that “the experiences that live outside of FCC.gov should interact back into it. In a perfect world, no one should have to visit the FCC website.” Instead, he said, you’d go to your favorite search engine or favorite app and open data from the FCC’s platform would be baked into it.

“If we think of citizens as shareholders, we can do a lot better,” he said. “Under the Administrative Procedure Act, agencies will get public comments that enlighten decisions. When citizens care, they should be able to give government feedback, and government should be able to take action. We want to enable better feedback loops to enable that to happen.”

If he’s able to execute against that vision on a national level, VanRoekel will have an impact. As a federal CIO, however, he’ll inherit a staggering challenge: evolve the nation’s aging IT systems towards a 21st century model of operations. In the age of big data, he’ll have to manage a lot of petabytes, doing much more with less.

He told that New York Times that “we’re trying to make sure that the pace of innovation in the private sector can be applied to the model that is government.”

Thank you for your service, Mr. Kundra. Good luck, Mr. VanRoekel. I’ll be following at @StevenVDC.

First reactions from around the Web.

Here’s some of the best coverage of the appointment from around the Web, starting with the Obama administration’s official announcement:

WHITEHOUSE: Transitions

OMB Director Jack Lew: Over the last two and a half years, the Administration has made unprecedented strides (PDF) in transforming how the government manages and uses information technology to deliver results for the American people. From moving to more efficient cloud solutions and shutting down hundreds of duplicative data centers to reducing planned IT spending by $3 billion and bringing unprecedented transparency to IT spending. That progress has been the direct result of having a President who recognizes the opportunity to harness advances in technology to make government work better and more efficiently for the American people. That’s why President Obama appointed the nation’s first Federal Chief Information Officer to implement the Administration’s technology reform agenda.

As the nation’s first Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra has left a lasting mark on Federal IT – from opening up data in new and innovative ways, to rooting out waste and duplication in IT spending, to steering the Federal government toward more energy efficient and cost effective technologies. And in this time of budgetary and fiscal challenges, sustaining and expanding on those efforts is more important than ever.

That’s why I am pleased that the President has appointed Steven VanRoekel as our next federal CIO. Steve is the right person to continue our efforts to make the government more efficient and more responsive to the America people. He brings a lifelong passion for technology to the position, having spent his entire career in technology in both the public and private sectors.

Under his leadership, I am confident that we will continue to build on the remarkable gains that we have made in changing the way the Federal government manages IT.

TECHPRESIDENT: White House appoints Steven VanRoekel as new US CIO

From outgoing CIO Vivek Kundra, who is leaving for Harvard University, he will inherit a drive to cut costs while continuing to work on a modernization effort that will proceed with markedly less funding this year than when Obama first took office. The E-Government fund, which financed the development of signature Kundra projects such as the Federal IT Dashboard and Data.gov, was cut to $8 million this year, from $34 million. The federal CIO’s portfolio includes government IT policy and procurement writ large, not just modernization and a slice of the work of opening up the government — but this represents a significant curtailment of the White House’s ability to support innovation in those areas.

VanRoekel will also face the often grindingly slow pace of progress inside federal government, something that Kundra and others departing the administration have admitted was challenging to face every day. But he won’t be a stranger to that. In an interview with Nancy Scola upon leaving the FCC, VanRoekel described modernizing a commission that, when he arrived, had an Internet connection so bad that “lawyers would have to go home to use LexisNexis to do their jobs.” Under VanRoekel, the commission relaunched its web presence in a way that completely reframes basic functions like searching for and submitting comments on matters the commission is considering — a subtle shift, but an important one for people trying to monitor and influence communications policy. He described swapping out junk food in vending machines for healthier options. By the time he left, he could watch a YouTube video on the FCC Internet connection without slowing down the entire network.

WASHINGTON POST: New CIO’s role will be belt-tightening.

Not only was VanRoekel, the former Microsoft executive, unfazed by the prospect of trying to persuade a government that has to make $917 billion in cuts over the next decade to pay for snazzy new technology projects but he actually saw the belt-tightening as an opportunity.

VanRoekel’s role will focus on using technology to streamline government and cut costs. This was one of Kundra’s top priorities.

“The productivity gap between where the private sector has gone over the last two decades and where government has gone is ever-widening,” VanRoekel, 41, told reporters Thursday morning, referring specifically to the government’s slow uptake and lack of spending on new technology. “[This] can be done in a way that actually saves money, saves resources and everything else.”

POLITICO: VanRoekel hopes to cut costs.

Rarely do you get to take over in a place where so much good work has been done and so much momentum is already established with teams charging ahead at full steam,” VanRoekel said Thursday, just after the White House announced his appointment.

VanRoekel will continue Kundra’s agenda of eliminating waste in bloated information technology projects, move agencies to cloud computing technologies and make the government more transparent using Web-based and crowd-sourced tools. …

“When a college student is sitting in a classroom with a MacBook Air and a WiFi network, they’re Tweeting and Facebook connecting with friends, getting daily Groupon emails — that’s a lifestyle that the government doesn’t currently cater to,” VanRoekel said. “Part of the priorities also needs to be creating a 21st century workplace.”

CRAIG NEWMARK: Steven VanRoekel, new US Chief Information Officer

…the good news is that Steven’s taken the job held recently by Vivek Kundra, who’s done a really good job of making Federal IT more effective and saved a lot of taxpayers dollars.

Steven comes from the FCC, where I saw first hand that he’s really good at the same, bringing with him a lot of real-life private industry experience.

There’ll be a lot of news on this really soon, but the deal is that I wanted to let people know the good news; I bear witness that Steven’s the real deal.

GOVEXEC: New federal CIO named; no major strategy changes anticipated.

What I saw at FCC is that this notion of re-imagining government in the context of the pace and innovation of private industry can be done and it can be done in a way that saves money and resources,” VanRoekel said during a roundtable discussion with reporters. “We were in lock step with [outgoing CIO] Vivek [Kundra’s] team on data center consolidation, on the cloud-first policy and on using tools like TechStat, even though we were an independent agency.”

“This is not a situation where we’re asking someone to come in and make radical changes to priorities or to the strategic agenda,” federal Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients said. “It’s about continued execution and getting proven results.”

FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK: New federal CIO gets praise, advice from community.

The White House’s appointment of former Microsoft and federal agency executive Steven VanRoekel as the new Federal CIO replacing Vivek Kundra was met with enthusiastic congratulations on Aug. 4, but not all the reaction was positive.

COMPUTER WORLD: Former Microsoft exec, Obama donor named new U.S. CIO.

Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at FedSources, said VanRoekel “has obviously been well positioned in industry” and combined with his government experience, could be helpful. But Microsoft competitors for federal contracts may feel a little apprehensive, noted Bjorklund.

“You can’t take on major government positions like that and play favorites – that’s not the right thing to do,” said Bjorklund. “Industry may have suspicions, but they may not be well founded suspicions,” he said.

FIERCE GOVERNMENT IT: White House taps VanRoekel to replace Kundra as federal CIO

VanRoekel led the recent relaunch of FCC.gov. The new FCC website has received mixed reviews, but agency representatives have maintained that the website launched “explicitly and very proudly in beta.” In a June 2 interview with The Hill, VanRoekel acknowledged that the FCC redesign has been poorly received by lawyers and regulatory personnel.

While VanRoekel has a great deal of management experience and has established himself as a technologist, he has never acted as an agency CIO or served on the Federal CIO Council. Prior to his appointment to federal CIO, Kundra was the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. Kundra’s predecessor, Karen Evans, was CIO of the Energy Department before her appointment at OMB.

NEXTGOV: New US CIO Has Cyber Track Record.

Incoming federal chief information officer Steven VanRoekel says experience safeguarding the cloud at his former employer, the Federal Communications Commission, has prepared him to improve the security of digital assets governmentwide.

In October, the then-FCC managing director announced that a new cloud-based environment hosting FCC.gov complied with a laundry list of security controls recommended under the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act. “Our team has fully abided by the FISMA standards throughout this process; at relaunch, FCC.gov will have met or exceeded both low and moderate levels of clearance, enabling us to distribute information, power collaboration and innovate freely,” VanRoekel wrote on the FCC blog.

GARTNER: Welcome the the new US federal CIO and good luck.

Andrea DiMaio: At face value, he looks like a wise choice to fill Vivek’s shoes: he understands technology and the business of technology, has pursued the use of open source software at FCC (hence cleaning his record as a former Microsoft executive for those who still see the Redmond company as the enemy of open source), and has had a prominent business position in the current administration.

On the downside, he has not been running IT (or IT-intensive businesses) in a large agency or department, which is where most of the turf battles as well as potential savings will happen. While Vivek built a vision for transformation and innovation in government IT, the challenges are now in executing on that vision, in moving open government from a nice-to-have to a must-have, in shifting the use of cloud from the edges to the core of the government enterprise. This will take a lot of diplomacy and his past experience in industry may help, although he may still need some time (and solid advice from his staff) to grasp with the complexity of much larger agencies than the one he has been part of.

In my humble opinion, his greatest challenge will be to turn Vivek’s suggestions into an indispensible weaponry for agencies and departments to weather the challenging times ahead. To succeed, he will need to pick few battles to win, rather than try to fight them all. Ironically, the difficult economic and financial situation and the threats to the sustainability of government services and operations could be his best allies to deliver on the IT innovation agenda of the current administration.

INFORMATION WEEK: The New Federal CIO: A Closer Look

VanRoekel hinted at some of the areas that he sees as ripe for further change–open government, shared services, IT procurement and investment. “Vivek’s work was really the first step in a larger reworking of federal IT,” he said. But don’t expect too much, too soon. “This is all early thinking, of course,” he added.

VanRoekel’s background in both the public and private sectors was another factor in his favor. Obama, Zients, and Kundra have all argued that federal agencies lag behind corporate America in leveraging technology. “The gap is the single largest different between public and private sector performance,” said Zients.

There’s a lot of interest in tapping into private sector know-how. In that light, VanRoekel’s years at Microsoft are a feather in his cap, regardless of how others in the tech industry may view that experience, which included a role as a speech and strategy assistant to Bill Gates.

Missing from VanRoeckel’s resume is experience as a CIO, a gap that, for this particular job, is impossible to ignore. The White House had no shortage of accomplished agency CIOs to consider as Kundra’s replacement. Zients acknowledged “there was a lot of interest” in the position. VanRoekel’s ability to think strategically and “get things done” made him the best choice, Zients said.

Ultimately, the federal CIO must close the tech gap that hampers government agencies, a task too big to be accomplished in the two years that Kundra devoted to it. But the government’s $80 billion IT budget is more than enough to cover what’s needed. It’s a matter how effectively that investment is managed, and now it’s VanRoekel’s job to get it right.

Think Different About Hacking?

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The words “hacker” and activity of “hacking” have been receiving a great deal of attention over the past few years, in the wake of data breaches, Wikileaks, the Anonymous and LulzSec groups, and now the “Shady Rat” cyberespionage revelations. Given that it’s being reported as the biggest hacking attack ever, the attention is merited.

As journalism professor Adam Penenberg highlighted last month in Fast Company, however, the term hacking and hacker are frequently misused in the mainstream, and it’s nearly always used with a negative connotation.

Maybe it’s time to revisit that interpretation, or at least broaden it. I’ve been a fan of Lifehacker since its launch, after all.

Earlier today, Kara Swisher reported that Randi Zuckerberg is leaving Facebook to start a new social media firm. In her resignation letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and communications head Elliot Schrage, Zuckerberg wrote that “I am thankful for the strong mentorship, guidance, and support, which is empowering me to follow my dreams and show that you don’t have to be an engineer to be a hacker.”

New York Times social media reporter Jennifer Preston highlighted that line from Zuckerberg’s letter on Twitter and, when asked if she believes it to be true, tweeted “sure.”

An hour ago, I wasn’t convinced. Great hackers have historically been venerated for legendary technical skills and creative approaches to solving problems, as writer Steven Levy chronicled in his canonical book of the same name, “Hackers.” Do you have to be a doctor to be a surgeon? Or a lawyer to practice law? Being a hacker does imply something specific in terms of your ability, if not credentials, as you can read in the Jargon File. In the programming community, hacking can be a technical term of art.

There’s also more to “hacking” than lawbreaking, despite today’s headlines.

Around the globe, there’s now a genuine movement of civic hacking afoot, which adds to the etymology of hacking “efforts that put technology, and particularly Internet technology, to work solving the problems of civic life,” as Nick Judd writes at techPresident. “Civic hacktivists” (also known as favorably called “civic developers) now gather together around the globe. Code for America is inspiring a new generation of civic coders.

Even with reasons to support hackathons, the negative connotation of “hacking” lingers. As the New York Times reported, when New York City chief digital officer Rachel Sterne proposed hosting a hackathon to generate ideas for redesigning NYC.gov, “she had to explain to colleagues that it would not pose a security threat.”

Think different

That said, it may be time to think more broadly about the term “hacking” itself. Matt Lira, director of new media for House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VI), agreed with Preston, suggesting that Thomas Jefferson, JFK and the GratefulDead were all hackers. Can hacker be a metaphor applied to government, rhetoric or music?

“I believe that is how the phrase was intended, or at least what it means to me,” tweeted Lira. “People who do things their own way.” He shared one of the iconic Apple commercials from the company’s turnaround in the late 1990s, after Steve Jobs returned, by way of interpretation:

To echo the final words of the ad, hackers could be described as “the people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.” On that count, I’ve now met many people who are hacking on open government since I became the Gov 2.0 correspondent for O’Reilly Media, both from the inside and outside of the system.

With support, luck and a lot of effort, maybe more modern day hackers will be “just crazy enough” to make the government work better.

Aspen Institute FOCAS’s on open government [LIVESTREAM]

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Today in Colorado, the Aspen Institute is continuing its week long Forum on Communications and Society. You can learn more about the FOCAS 2011 here; it’s the sort of high level gathering of leaders from public sector, private industry and academy you expect to see at the Aspen Institute. If you’d like to tune in, there’s a livestream available, embedded below.

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

You can follow the backchannel on Twitter at the #focas11 hashtag:

//

Below, I’ve embedded Harvard professor Archon (@arfung) Fung’s presentation on innovations in e-democracy and archived videos from the conference.

Session II, Part 1

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

Session II, Part 2

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

Untangling fake followers, Newt Gingrich and Twitter’s Suggested User’s List

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If most of former United States Speaker of the House @NewtGingrich‘s followers on Twitter are “fake” or inactive, they’re more likely to have primarily come through a gift from Twitter in 2009 than any clandestine campaign purchases. Remember when Anil Dash wrote that “Ryan Osborn does too, (@Rozzy) over at NBC News, who reminded me of Dash’s post today.

The issue of “fake followers” arose today after an incendiary post by John Cook over at Gawker sourced the comments of an anonymous former campaign staffer alleging that Gingrich paid “follow agencies” to create some 80% of his followers. Mashable has picked up the story, asking if the former United States Speaker of the House bought most of his Twitter followers.” The allegations surfaced today a few weeks after Politico published a glowing story about “Gingrich being miles ahead in the Twitter primary,” with “an impressive 1.3 million followers.”

Unfortunately, covering this election season as a “social media horse race,” with social media followers numbers as a 21st century success metric, holds some risks. (OhMyGov, to be fair, generally takes a much nuanced approach than most mainstream outlets.)

All three writers (and their editors) have apparently forgotten that Newt Gingrich was added to Twitter’s Suggested User List back in the fall of 2009, about three weeks after an AP story reported that Government” list. He has retained over a million followers since then in the way that Politico depicted — but he didn’t get there through deepy policy wonkery and quick wit alone.

On the one hand, if it’s confirmed that the campaign has been pumping Gingrich’s follower numbers through third parties, it will be yet another case study to add to the rapidly growing pile of political social media snafus and I’ll eat some crow about the origin of those hundreds of thousands of accounts. As Vanessa Fox tweeted, “both methods likely contributed. people/orgs fall back on fakes to drum up #s way too often, but suggested list def much of it.”

On the other hand, if it turns out that media outlets simply developed amnesia about Twitter’s early history, there might be enough crow around to bake a Blackbird Pie or two.

UPDATE: An analysis by social media analytics firm PeekYou supports the anonymous staffer’s accusation of “follower fraud:”

The Consumer Ratio measures the percentage of a Twitter audience that is identified as a “consumer” or “voter” in Newt’s case, vs business, private/anonymous and spam accounts. The average range sits anywhere between 30-60% human depending on this type of account. Newt’s was 8% — the lowest the team had ever seen by 5%.

“We have seen some pretty low ‘Consumer Ratios’ in our testing, but Newt Gingrich’s was the lowest we had ever seen. At first, we actually thought it might have been a bug on our side, but a quick manual look at the data showed our analysis was true,” said Michael Hussey, CEO and founder of PeekYou.

“Once the news broke yesterday the team went back to look at the report. The data supported that out of Newt’s 1.3 million followers only 8 percent (2 percent less than claimed in recent media reports), are identified by our algorithm as humans, meaning Newt’s follower count is really closer to 106,055,” continued Hussey.

When assessing those approximately 100,000 followers via PeekAnalytics, the company established that 67% are male, 41% are over 35 years old, and 61% have less than 100 online connections. Using normalized population data, the top 5 states for legitimate followers are Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. In addition, more than the majority write a blog (typically supporting press/blogger interest) and favor Facebook as their social network of choice.

UPDATE II: Indiana University has posted an analysis of the 2012 presidential candidates’ Twitter followers that offers some more insight. In the chart below, pulled from Indiana’s post and data, the data from a random sampling of 5000 accounts following the candidates is displayed. Smaller values correspond to bluer colors, larger values corresponding to redder colors. Draw your own conclusions.

*I was added to Twitter’s “Technology” recommendations in early 2010, after the SUL was scrapped for an algorithm that I suspect is at least partially based on Lists. My Twitter account @digiphile) now has nearly 90,000 followers, up from 7,500 or so. While I think most of you are real, I suspect some of those accounts are similarly inactive or (gasp) robots. I haven’t had the time to weed through tens of thousands of notifications to groom them out. If you’ve made it to the end of this post, know that I’m much more interested (and grateful) to see how many of you reply to me, read me or share my work than my follower count. It’s ok. Nobody really has 1,000,000 followers, after all, with the obvious exception of @JustinBieber, whose intensely loyal fans have been known to put an unexpected stress test on young photosharing startups.

[Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore]

Following Twitter and Facebook, White House experiments with LinkedIn for questions

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Over the course of the last year, the White House has experimented with each of the leading social media platforms to solicit questions and host conversations around events. This week in Silicon Valley, the nation could watch online to see if a LinkedIn forum could generate useful results. The White House Council on Jobs and Effectiveness hosted a session on job creation that featured questions submitted from LinkedIn. Archived video from the forum is embedded below, with an updated discussion at the end of the post.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra wrote more about this Palo Alto jobs session at the White House blog:

I’ll be joining Jobs Council Members Steve Case, John Doerr, Sheryl Sandberg, as well as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on a panel moderated by the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson. The panel will focus on issues that impact entrepreneurs and high growth businesses, as well the importance of innovation, entrepreneurship and high growth companies to our economy. During the Session, Council members will respond to questions and comments from people across the country submitted via LinkedIn and Facebook.

Add your voice to the dialogue by sending us your questions and comments:

  • Right now, you can post your questions and comments on the White House LinkedIn group. Here’s what we’re looking for:
    • What questions do you have for Steve Case, John Doerr, Reed Hastings and Sheryl Sandberg about accelerating growth and job creation for innovative companies?
    • What policy recommendations would you want them to consider for their report to the President?
    • What are some of the obstacles you’re facing with regard to your workforce and finding talent?
    • What have you found to be successful practices in hiring and managing your workforce
  • Watch live on Tuesday, August 2nd at 1:00 p.m. ET/ 10:00 a.m PT on www.whitehouse.gov/live

More platforms, more questions?

The event comes with some context. In January, AskObama was on YouTube. In April, President Obama talked with Mark Zuckerbeg in what one could call the first “Facehall.” In July, Jack Dorsey moderated the first Twitter @Townhall.

Given that LinkedIn is focused on professional social networking, it’s not unreasonable to look there for questions on job creation. Whether tapping into that network works any better for soliciting questions or moderating them then ideation tools like Google Moderator, IdeaScale or UserVoice is unclear, given that the forums are not expressly designed for that purpose.

New social media platforms have emerged over the past year, of course. As the White House continues to experiment with social media, perhaps we’ll find out if Quora does politics at the White House — Congressional leaders like Paul Ryan are already there — or if the communications team tries a Google Plus Hangout, as Newt Gingrich tried earlier this summer. Given the interest that White House staff expressed in the latter platform during the White House tweetup at the recent (real life) presidential town hall at the University of Maryland, keep your eyes open.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson did a creditable job pulling from the questions on LinkedIn. After listening to them posed at the forum, however, it’s not at all clear to me that using a LinkedIn group was the ideal way to enable a distributed audience to submit questions. There are many platforms that have been built specifically for ideation that might make more sense to apply. Still, as a first experiment, this produced a series of questions for the moderator to pose that might not otherwise have been posed.

The WhiteHouse blog post on the forum of tech leaders included a statement from Chopra about three clarifications to existing immigration policies that can enable entrepreneurs to start companies here:

“First, we’re clarifying what it means to declare entrepreneurship in the national interest. Second, in an H1B visa, typically temporary in nature, the question is: Can you come in as an immigrant founder? If there’s a way to demonstrate that there’s a separation between your role as founder and that role as employee, you have the ability to pursue that existing avenue. Third, we have a category that exists called the EB5 visa for immigrant investors. If you’re willing to invest 1 million dollars in the United States and create 10 new jobs you have the authority to come in under this condition. But it’s a complicated process and we only use half the alloted slots. So we’re streamlining the process and making this more attractive for folks who want to create jobs in industries for the future”