Beth Simone Noveck

Professor of Law
Director, Democracy Design Workshop 

 

 

 

Professor Beth Simone Noveck served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder and director of the White House Open Government Initiative (2009-2011). UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her Senior Advisor for Open Government. She 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 we can use technology to create more open and collaborative government. With a grant awarded to New York Law School from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, she is collaborating with colleagues to create a research network on the impact of technology on democratic institutions.
 
She founded the Democracy Design Workshop: Do Tank, a program for the design of law, policy, and technology to foster openness and collaboration. With support from the Sloan Foundation, she is currently prototyping OrgPedia, the Wikipedia of firms. 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 Peer To Patent. 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.
 
A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she was named one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine, ” Top 25 Game Changers” by Politico and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post. A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, she spoke at TEDGlobal on the future of government.
 
Her book Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press 2009), appeared in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and in an audio edition. She is also co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press 2006). Her new book, The Networked State will appear with Harvard University Press. She tweets@bethnoveck and blogs at the Cairns Blog.
 
She is on leave 2012-2014 and visiting at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the MIT Media Lab.

 

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.

Courses:

At New York Law School since 2002

Publications