Megan Smith, 3rd US CTO, CEO with shift7, sits down with Rebecca Knight and Jeff Frick at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. #GHC17 #theCUBE #WomenInTech https://siliconangle.com/2017/10/11/high-technology-heroines-meet-women-blazing-new-trails-tech-ghc17-womenintech/ Cross-pollinating tech innovation The Grace Hopper conference attendance has grown as companies inside and outside tech realize how the event and the Institute can help them promote diversity in the workplace and retain female employees. As tech cross-pollinates many industries, technologists and non-technologists will increasingly exchange skills, according to Whitney. For example, “There’s this real effort to bring state-of-the-art technology into our government, initially spearheaded by Megan Smith,” she said. TheCUBE interviewed Smith, chief executive officer at Shift7.co, on her groundbreaking work bringing government agencies into the digital age. Smith served under the Obama administration as the third U.S. chief technology officer; she was the first woman to hold the office. The technology efforts inside the government are non-partisan and aimed at putting technology to work for public good, according to Smith. “Let’s have our services be as great as Amazon, or as Twitter or Oracle and not be sort of retro,” she said. Smith worked to attract high-level technologists to work for the government through terms of service like the Presidential Innovation Fellow and the U.S. Digital Service. She also worked on the Computer Science for All initiative, which seeks to make computer science education mandatory for high school graduation. “Coding is a 21st century fluency. It’s a skill we all need, like freshman biology,” she said.