Indeed, and thank you. The reason I have taken the startup and consulting route is the intuition that these are upstream of the institutions, and this is where

Indeed, and thank you. The reason I have taken the startup and consulting route is the intuition that these are upstream of the institutions, and this is where I suspect a technically inclined individual can effect the most change. In the ~20y I've been around govt, arguably Linux, GitHub, Docker, Jira/Atlassian, PowerBI, VMWare, LinkedIn, SalesForce, and even Twitter have done more to transform government than any endogenous solution could. EVen in the last 5 years, AirBNB and Uber have altered the economics of municipalities faster than anything planned might have. These techs are all still in early stages there, (and the economics of devops break public service finance, but that's another story) but you can see the downstream effects they have. So far regarding public services, my two favourite models have been In-Q-Tel and 18f.gov. The first is far upstream, and the second has been a way to navigate it. It's worth considering that a public sector CTO role is really a "steady hand on the tiller" role to navigate the things we're all building upstream. The CTO is a necessary role, but my experience is that heroes and visionaries will likely select out fast, and framing it as a navigator role might yield different results.