Eric Schmidt’s summer of public policy
July 26th, 2007 | Published in Google Public Policy
You (or at least the engineers among you) may have heard about Google's Summer of Code. Based on our CEO's recent schedule, this is looking more and more like Eric Schmidt's Summer of Public Policy.
As more and more public policy issues affect Google and our users, Eric and many of our other senior executives have made an effort to meet more often with policymakers in Washington and around the country to talk about the future of the Internet -- and the individuals it empowers. Loyal blog readers may recall that YouTube's Chad Hurley was here to testify on online video in May and our people operations VP Laszlo Bock testified on immigration in June.
Last weekend, Eric was in Traverse City, Michigan speaking to the annual conference of the National Governors Association. As reported by the Traverse City Record-Eagle, Eric told the governors that "education must evolve to teach students how to research and access information instead of memorizing facts," and lamented that the tremendous teaching resources on the Internet are not being fully used to teach students. Check out the full video of Eric's NGA talk:
On Monday, Eric joined YouTube's Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in Charleston, South Carolina for the first CNN/YouTube presidential debate (which, by the way, was the second most-watched presidential debate so far...in no small part to the revolutionary voter-generated format). Today, Eric showed up on Capitol Hill to meet with a number of Senators and House members, discussing health care, patent reform, immigration, privacy and consumer issues. And next month, Eric will be among the tech policy wonks gathering at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual Aspen Summit, where we expect our recent advocacy for spectrum reform will be a big topic of discussion.