Beth Simone Noveck is a visiting professor at NYU Wagner. She 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. Also a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, Dr. Noveck is on leave as professor of law and founder of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School.

She focuses her scholarship, activism and teaching on the future of democracy in the 21st century. Professor Noveck directs the Governance Lab funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Housed at NYU Wagner, the Gov Lab accelerates and assesses progress toward smarter, more collaborative and decentralized governance.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top Global Thinkers for 2012,” “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 2012 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 (very occasionally) blogs at the Cairns Blog.