Beth Simone Noveck

ON LEAVE

Professor of Law
Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government in the White House
Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy
Director, Democracy Design Workshop and the
"Do Tank" Founder, State of Play: Law and Virtual Worlds Annual Conference

An expert on the impact of technology on legal and political institutions, Beth Simone Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property, innovation and constitutional law as well as courses on electronic democracy and electronic government. She is the author of the book Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful(Brookings Institution Press).

Beth Simone Noveck pioneered the creation of the Democracy Design Workshop, a collaborative "do tank," where students and faculty at New York Law School and across institutions work together in teams to develop legal code and software code to foster open, transparent and collaborative ways of learning, working and governing. The Do Tank (http://dotank.nyls.edu) is a first-of-its kind legal R&D lab where lawyers innovate, harnessing the new tools of information and communications to the goals of social justice. Projects address, not only how law regulates technology, but how to wield technology to improve law teaching and practice, encourage participatory governance and enable collaboration within organizations and communities.

With the support of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, CA, IBM, Microsoft, HP, GE, Intellectual Ventures and Red Hat, Professor Noveck launched the Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review project in collaboration with the United States patent and Trademark Office (www.peertopatent.org). Peer-to-Patent is the legal, policy and software framework to open patent examination for public participation for the first time. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council of Europe and AmericaSpeaks have sponsored her research on online communities by funding the 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.

Prof. Noveck is the founder and organizer of the State of Play conferences, the annual event on virtual worlds research. With the support of the Maya Foundation, she launched the State of Play Academy, a virtual world space for democratizing legal education by teaching law to non-lawyers. The Academy is also an experimental space for studying the impact of virtual worlds on learning and teaching.

Professor Noveck is a founder of Bodies Electric LLC, developer of the Unchat software for realtime structured and democratic group deliberation in cyberspace. She is a member of the ABA's Commission on Electronic Rulemaking and the OMB Watch Taskforce on Transparency and Public Participation in Government. She is a member of the Legal Expert Network of the Institute for the Study of the Information Society and Technology (Insites) at the Carnegie Mellon Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, a member of the editorial board for First Monday (www.firstmonday.org), I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and of the advisory board of the International Journal for Communications Law and Policy(IJCLP). She is a member of the advisory board of the Nanyang Technical University Centre on Asia Pacific Technology Law and Policy (CAPTEL) in Singapore, where she visited as a Fulbright Senior Specialist and co-editor of the book series, (NYU Press) and blogs at The Cairns Blog, available at http://cairns.typepad.com.

Previously a telecommunications and Internet lawyer practicing in New York, Prof. Noveck is also the McClatchy Associate Visiting Professor, Stanford University, Dept. of Communication. She served as a volunteer advisor on innovation in government for Obama for America and as a member of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Policy group for the Obama-Biden Transition.

Professor Noveck graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor and Master of Arts. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. After studying as a Rotary Foundation graduate fellow at Oxford University, she earned a doctorate at the University of Innsbruck with the support of a Fulbright grant.

Index to Faculty Profiles

Noveck Weblog: "The Cairns Blog"