A temporary appointment to the NSF turned into an unexpected mid-career change. The (still continuing!) saga of a computer science life at NSF, OSTP, NAS, and with some European connections will be briefly outlined. The topics encountered along the way include the Internet, Open Science, and FAIR data.
After receiving his PhD in mathematics from ISU in 1969, George Strawn, in the 1980s, served as the Computer Science department chair and ISU Computation Center Director. In the 1990s, he went to NSF to oversee the Internet emergence and has subsequently served in various positions at NSF, OSTP, and NAS.