Beth Simone Noveck Noveck is a professor of law at New York Law School. Dr. Noveck served in the White House as the nation's first Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011) and leader of the White House Open Government Initiative (www.whitehouse.gov/open). As a result of the Administration’s open government efforts, today every executive branch department and major agency has an open government plan that outlines specific and innovative commitments to create more effective government. Also, hundreds of thousands of collections of government information are now freely available to the public on the Web, and citizens have burgeoning opportunities to use new platforms to participate in their democracy. Noveck founded the Democracy Design Workshop. This "Do Tank" designs law, policy, and technology to foster openness and collaboration. Together with students at New York Law School, she designed and built the U.S. government's first expert network (http://www.peertopatent.org). She also developed the Cairns Project, graphical software to support group formation and collaboration; Democracy Island, an experimental space within a virtual world for research on citizen participation; and is spearheading the development of “ORGPedia,” a platform for mashing up and visualizing public corporate accountability data and tracking the evolution of organizations. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded Professor Noveck a grant to apply her expertise to developing a multi-year interdisciplinary research agenda to gauge the impact of digital networks on institutions and how we can use such technology to strengthen democratic culture. In 2010, Professor Noveck was named “One of the Hundred Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine and “One of the Top 5 Game Changers” by Politico. She is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press, 2009), which will appear this year in Arabic, Chinese, and in an audio edition, and is co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2006). She blogs at cairns.typepad.com and tweets at @bethnoveck.