DJ Patil, the U.S. chief data scientist, likes to describe himself as an instigator.
"We usually think of instigators as people who causes trouble," Patil says. And in some ways, this is exactly what the band of tech outsiders rebooting the government is doing. They've boldly entered the world's largest bureaucracy with the goal of shaking things up, making services run more efficiently for the American people and introducing fresh new ways of doing things. In many ways, their work threatens the status quo. But Patil believes that instigators have a valuable role to play.
