Beth Simone Noveck

Professor of Law
Director, Democracy Design Workshop 

 

 

 

Beth Simone Noveck is a Professor of Law. She served in the White House as United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011) and leader of the White House Open Government Initiative (@opengov). As a result of the Administration’s Open Government efforts, today every department and agency has an Open Government Plan that outlines specific and innovative commitments to create more effective government. Also hundreds of thousands of collections of government information are now freely available to the public on the Web and citizens have burgeoning opportunities to use new platforms to participate in their democracy.


Dr. Noveck served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and was a volunteer advisor to the Obama for America campaign on issues of technology, innovation, and government reform.


She focuses her scholarship, activism and teaching on the future of democracy in the 21st century. Specifically, her work addresses how digital networks impact institutions and how we can use such technologies to strengthen democratic culture. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation in 2011-12, she is developing an agenda for interdisciplinary research on institutional innovation.


She founded the Democracy Design Workshop Do Tank, a program for the design of law, policy, and technology to foster openness and collaboration. She envisions the opportunity for institutional innovation as a series of solvable design problems. Together with students at New York Law School and with the support of the Omdiyar Network, MacArthur Foundation and seven leading patent-holding firms, she designed and built the U.S. government’s first expert network (http://www.peertopatent.org). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council of Europe and AmericaSpeaks have sponsored her research on online communities by funding then Cairns Project, graphical software to support group formation and collaboration. She also received a grant from ICAIR to support the creation of Democracy Island, an experimental space within a virtual world for research on citizen participation. She is currently working with colleagues inside government and out on the design for “IOPedia,” a platform for mashing up and visualizing public corporate accountability data and tracking the evolution of organizations.


Dr. Noveck founded the State of Play conference, the first (and still ongoing annual) conference on videogames, virtual worlds and society. She was named “One of the Hundred Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine and “One of the Top 5 Game Changers” by Politico in 2010. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she holds a PhD from the University of Innsbruck and is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press 2009), which will appear this year in Arabic and Chinese and in an audio edition (http://www.universitypressaudiobooks.com/detail.php/61), and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press 2006). She tweets @bethnoveck.


Upcoming Events:

March 4-5 Transportation Camp East

March 7 NICO (Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems) and SONIC (Science of Networks in Communities Research Group at Northwestern) Complexity Conference.

March 15 SXSW Interactive

March 20-21 White House Open Government Initiative/National Archives Conference on Open Government Research
 

 

Contact Information:

T: 212-431-2355
F: 212-791-2144
E: bnoveck@nyls.edu
O: 40 Worth, SE 938
Mailing Address: 47 Worth Street

Education:

Harvard, A.B. 1991 magna cum laude, A.M. 1992
Oxford, Rotary Foundation Doctoral Fellow 1993-94
University of Innsbruck, Ph.D. 1994, Fulbright Scholar
Yale Law School, J.D. 1997
Founding Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project.
Law Clerk, Hon. Leonard B. Sand, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. Concentrates research on intellectual property, technology, and constitutional law.

At New York Law School since 2002

Publications