Beth Simone Noveck is the United States deputy chief technology officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative. Currently on leave from her academic career, she previously taught at the New York Law School in the areas of intellectual property, innovation and constitutional law, as well as courses on electronic democracy and electronic government.Noveck created the Democracy Design Workshop, a collaborative “do tank,” where students and faculty at New York Law School work in teams to develop legal code and software code to promote transparent and collaborative ways of learning, working and governing.
With the support of grants from various foundations and corporations, Noveck launched the Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Peer-to-Patent is the legal, policy and software framework to open patent examination for public participation for the first time.
Noveck is also 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.
Noveck 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 at the Carnegie Mellon Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, a member of the editorial board for First Monday, 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. She is a member of the advisory board of the Nanyang Technical University Centre on Asia Pacific Technology Law and Policy in Singapore, where she visited as a Fulbright senior specialist.
Previously a telecommunications and Internet lawyer practicing in New York, Noveck is also the McClatchy associate visiting professor at the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She served as a volunteer adviser 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.
Noveck graduated from Harvard University with bachelor’s degree in social studies and a master’s degree in comparative literature. She earned a law degree 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.