Beth Simone Noveck


Beth Simone Noveck is New Jersey's first Chief Innovation Officer, a professor in the Technology, Culture, and Society department at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, the director of the Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance, and an inaugural ICMA Local Government Research Fellow.
She is also an affiliated professor at NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress and Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, a Fellow at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, and a Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. She also serves as one of nine members of the Digitalrat, a council to advise German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues concerning the digital transformation of society.
From 2009 to 2011, she was the United States deputy chief technology officer for open government and led President Obama's Open Government Initiative. She was based at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and served as an expert on governance, technology and institutional innovation. On May 16, 2011, she was appointed senior advisor for Open Government by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. She is a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Government, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful, and co-editor of the State of Play: Law and Virtual Worlds.

Background

Raised in Toms River, New Jersey, she graduated from Harvard University with an AM magna cum laude, and the University of Innsbruck with a Ph.D. She graduated from Yale Law School with a JD.
She directs The Governance Lab, also known as the Govlab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance, which is designed to improve peoples lives through innovative governance.
She was formerly the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab. She is a former professor of law at New York Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. She served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011 under President Barack Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government, and she served on the Obama-Biden White House transition team. She's also designed or collaborated on Unchat, The Do Tank, Peer To Patent, Data.gov, Challenge.gov and the Gov Lab's Living Labs and training platform, The Academy. She is also a member of the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress and a board member of the Center for Open Science, the Open Contracting Partnership, the EPSRC Center for the Mathematics of Precision Healthcare, and the NHS Digital Academy.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Open Contracting Partnership. Since 2011, she has served as a Board Director of Cambia, the non-profit social enterprise that runs The Lens. She served on the Global Commission on Internet Governance and chaired the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multi-Stakeholder Innovation. She was named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy, one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post. She has also been honored by both the National Democratic Institute and Public Knowledge for her work in civic technology.
She is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful, which has also appeared in Arabic, Russian, Chinese and in an audio edition, and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds. Her latest book Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing appeared with Harvard University Press in 2015.. She is currently working on a new book about public entrepreneurship titled "Public Entrepreneurship: A Handbook for 21st Century Leaders".
Previously, Noveck directed the Institute for Information Law & Policy and the Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law School where she is on-leave as a professor. She is the founder of the "Do Tank," and the State of Play Conferences, and launched Peer-to-Patent, the first community patent review project, in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trade Office. She has taught in the areas of intellectual property, innovation, and constitutional law, as well as courses on electronic democracy and electronic government.
In August 2018 Noveck was nominated as one of ten members for the newly created Digitalrat, a council to advise the Federal government of Germany on issues concerning the digital transformation of society. On August 13, 2018, Noveck was appointed by Governor Phil Murphy to be the Chief Innovation Officer of New Jersey.