Position: United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director, White House Open Government Initiative
Credit: GSA
Why She Matters
A patent office where anyone with an internet connection can help review applications. An online conference that makes it feel as if you’re sitting around a table. Bills drafted and edited entirely by constituents. These sound like far-off ideas, but they are all possible, thanks to tools pioneered by Noveck.
The open government advocate has a degree from Yale Law School. Though she is a fulltime law professor at New York Law School, her professional career has focused on developing technologies that increase participation in democracy. In the Obama administration, Noveck leads the open government initiative at the Technology Office at the White House.
At a Glance
Current Position: Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House (since January 2009)
Career History: Obama for America, Volunteer Policy Advisor (2007 to 2008); Law Professor, New York Law School (since 2002); Bodies Electric, President and CEO (1999 to 2002)
Birthday: N/A
Hometown: Toms River, N.J.
Alma Mater: Harvard University, B.A. (social studies), 1991; Harvard, M.A. (comparative literature), 1992; Universitat Innsbruck, PhD., 1994; Yale Law School, J.D., 1997
Spouse: N/A
Religion: N/A
Office: N/A
Email N/A
Web site
Path to Power
Noveck was born in Toms River, N.J. She graduated from Harvard in 1991 with a degree in social studies. She earned her Master’s from Harvard in comparative literature then moved to Austria to complete her Ph.D. on the rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1920s at the Universitat Innsbruck.
It was that research that first drew her to open government issues. “This picqued my interest in how political institutions can innovate instead of breaking,” she wrote in an email. “I began to understand how we could use technology as a tool to help us innovate.”
Noveck returned to the U.S. in 1994 to study at Yale Law School. She earned her J.D. in 1997 then clerked for Hon. L.B. Sand in New York City.
In 1998, Noveck joined Dune, Morris and Hecksher as an associate. At the same time, she served as a founding fellows and director of international projects at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. In that position, Noveck helped develop the layer cake filtering model for user-driven ratings, which creates many filters for content rather than simply blocking sites.
In 1999, Noveck founded Bodies Electric LLC, a consulting firm that develops online solutions “for the wired world.” Her firm is responsible for creating Unchat, software that simulates conferences online.
In 2002, Noveck was named a professor at New York Law School. She also founded the Do Tank, an interdisciplinary research initiative that “promotes collaborative governance through law, policy and technology” and the Center for Patent Innovation. Their most famous innovation was the Peer to Patent project to help the U.S. Patent Office run collaborative examinations of patents.
In 2007, Noveck joined President Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign as a volunteer policy adviser on technology and government. After Obama won, she advised his transition team. In 2009, she was named Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Open Government.
In Her Own Words
We have to focus on the outcomes,” Noveck said in April 2009. “We spend much too much time measuring on the basis of the inputs ... instead of asking, ‘What does it help us achieve?’”
The Issues
Noveck is leading the Obama administration’s open government initiative, where she will focus on incorporating more voices into policy planning. To do this, she has already created several online forums where readers can comment on White House proposals and add their own ideas.
In order to ensure thoughtful, targeted feedback, Noveck emphasizes several core principals – instead of calling for general feedback, she asks readers specific questions. She has also added tools that allow readers to rank others comments so that she can track the most popular ideas. Additionally, she believes that sites must actively recruit the audience they are seeking, reaching out to volunteers across relevant industries.
“We have to focus on the outcomes,” Noveck said at an April 2009 conference of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. “We spend much too much time measuring on the basis of the inputs: how much we spent on a project, how much it cost us, how much we've given out in grants, how much we spent on a particular IT system ... instead of asking, ‘What does it help us achieve?’”
Noveck would eventually like to create a system that allows internet users to comment and revise policy as it is being written. “It's one thing to build a Web site that gives people a place to submit a suggestion and another thing to actually create a policy to route the information to the right place, to ensure that there is someone at the other end to receive it,” Noveck said at a 2009 conference.
Encouraging Participation in Government
In her book Wiki Government, Noveck argues that the digital age requires us to fundamentally rethink democracy because the internet allows for a much more collaborative legislative process and can potentially make more people responsible for making policy decisions. "The private sector has learned that better decision making requires looking beyond institutionalized centers of expertise,” she wrote in the book. “Now it's time for government to do the same.”
To do this, Noveck proposes a system in which a wide range of experts can collect and analyze information. She envisions online networks that allow participants to contribute small bits of knowledge and suggestions on a broad range of projects. She has called for the creation of “civic software” that will enable online communities to discuss ideas for their communities and develop tools for “enabling the expert public to contribute targeted information.”
One challenge the fledging operation has faced is keeping contributors on topic. Its first online forum – where it asked participants to generate ways President Obama can fulfill his open-government pledge – generated comments on legalizing marijuana, extraterrestrials and the veracity of Obama’s birth certificate.
In the New York Times, Noveck suggested that this was a healthy part of the process. “Even for people who want to talk about U.F.O.’s or the Kennedy assassination, we have created a forum for people to have a conversation with each other, and potentially to go off and organize and develop this further,” she said.
She also argued that tools like an online voting system for the best ideas and a system for flagging off-topic comments allow readers to police themselves.
Technology writer Micah Sifry wrote that “the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team.” He noted that there were a limited number of comments that dealt with the issues at hand.
Patent Office
In 2007, Noveck launched a program that helped the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to address some of its backlog through an online peer review program. The Peer-to-Patent operation allows inventors to post their patent application online. Anyone can then submit commentary that might be relevant. “This historic initiative connects an open network of community input to the legal decision-making process,” the web site reads. The public then together determines the top ten references and send those to the USPTO. This makes the patent process more effective.
In its first year, the program oversaw 400 patents.
Data Access
“Government data is a national asset - it belongs to the taxpayer,” Beth Noveck told National Public Radio in 2009. She has attempted to turn this belief to reality through sites like recovery.gov, which showcase large amounts of raw government information, in this case indexing how the $700 billion stimulus is spent.
But critics have said the sites aren’t all they are cracked up to be. The stimulus money “is incredibly difficult to track,” Eric Umansky of ProPublica told On The Media. “The government itself has found it difficult to track. With various agencies giving various numbers and various status reports, if it’s hard for the government to track, it’s even more of a task for us to track.”
