Videos
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NJ AI Summit AI, Society and Policy -
Solving Public Problems with Beth Noveck
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7 Skills to Save the World | Beth Noveck | TEDxNortheasternU
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Ian P. Sharp Lecture featuring Beth Simone Noveck
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Beth Noveck: Effective and Accountable AI in the Public Sector -
Beth Simone Noveck | Unlocking collective intelligence: AI’s role in enhancing democracy
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Solving Public Problems | Intro | Beth Simone Noveck
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Today's Problems, Tomorrow's Toolkit: The Public Sector and the Future of Work
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Beth Noveck: Demand a more open-source government
Learn More About Beth Simone Noveck
Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab). She is on the faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
Noveck’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more equitable and open ways of working using new technology. Her upcoming book, “Democracy Rebooted: How AI Can Save Democracy” will be released by Yale University Press. Today, she leads the GovLab’s InnovateUS initiative, which trains public sector professionals in AI, digital and innovation skills.
Noveck has spent her teaching career working with students to build technology for social good. She launched Northeastern’s product-based learning AI for Impact Co-Op, building on twenty years of experience teaching experiential civic technology clinics. Noveck is the founder of open, online courses such as Solving Public Problems, which has helped social innovators in over 100 countries take a project from idea to implementation and Open Justice for legal innovators.
Previously, Noveck served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama. She founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which created policies and platforms, such as data.gov and challenge.gov, for making the federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.
Noveck also served as Senior Advisor For Open Government for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and between 2018-2021, she served on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Digital Council. Noveck is the inaugural c-editor of ACM’s Digital Government Research and Practice journal.
Appointed the State of New Jersey’s first Chief AI Strategist by Governor Phil Murphy, she previously served as the state’s Chief Innovation Officer (2018-2024). The Office of Innovation uses new technology to improve equitable delivery of government services. The Office has worked with partner agencies to modernize unemployment insurance, provide a whole-of-government response to COVID-19, collect real-time infection data, deliver everything needed to start, run and grow a business, and use open data to provide training information to job seekers and improve uptake of benefits, services and permits. Noveck also serves as co-chair of the State’s AI Taskforce and previous led the State’s Future of Work Task Force.
Among her many earlier civic technology projects, Noveck created Unchat, one of the first online platforms for democratic deliberation, Peer-to-Patent to connect scientists to policymakers to improve the patent process, The Cairns Project for citizen co-creation and ideation, and two decades before the Metaverse, she built Democracy Island in Second Life to test out new ways for people to engage with one another civically online.
Noveck is also the author of three earlier books including “Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World” (Yale University Press, June 2021) which was named one of the best books of the year by Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Noveck was named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy, one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”, a “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post, and one of the World’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical. She was awarded a doctorat honoris causa by the University of Geneva. She blogs at RebootDemocracy.ai.
Beth Simone Noveck is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.
Beth Simone Noveck offers keynote presentations, interactive virtual experiences, workshops and panel discussions on a number of topics, including but not limited to the following:
- The Intersection of Democracy and AI
- Improving Operational Efficiency with AI
- Bridging the Gap Between Public and Private
- How to Use AI for Policy-Making
- Training the Workplace of the Future
- Managing AI Risk While Improving Lives and Communities
Contact us to learn more about these topics or other topics Beth Noveck can customize to your organization’s needs.
Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World
(Yale University Press, June 2021)
Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing
(Harvard University Press, November 2015)
Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful
(Brookings Institution Press, April 2009)
Praise for "Solving Public Problems"
“The book offers a wealth of information necessary to improve human-centered design in public policies.”
"Noveck celebrates the potential of data and technology to solve problems by engaging citizens. This is her most comprehensive book yet, bursting with sage, practical advice for public sector officials and civil society actors who want to engage citizens and give them more power."
"This important book provides an engaging explanation of why and, above all, how both institutions and individuals can make the world a better place through greater use of data, robust collaboration, rapid evidence review, and rigorous experimentation."
"Public problem solving melds traditional policy research and analysis with direct innovation and experimentation, often with a dose of technology thrown in. This book is sure to become the magnum opus in the field, written by one of its pioneers. Highly recommended!"
"In a world where a billion people are on the verge of extreme poverty and the adverse effect of climate change is disproportionately impacting the poorest countries, 'Solving Public Problems' is a vital manual for showing all of us how to build forward better and accelerate the creation of innovative, sustainable, scalable solutions to our greatest challenges. A must read!"
“This book gives you hope by showing how governments can get things done fast, effectively, and with quality. Noveck shows how to break logjams and make progress against critically important problems. Amazing.”
“Beth Noveck’s book is a universal reminder of the importance of investing in public sector capability and collective intelligence if we want to solve the most pressing issues our democracies face today.”
Praise for "Smart Citizens, Smarter State"
“New peer-to-peer technology platforms have radically democratized how information spreads, how capital flows, and even how cabs get hailed in the twenty-first century. But our government itself remains a largely closed system, with relatively few opportunities for public engagement and collaboration. In this book, Beth Simone Noveck lays out a fresh and ambitious vision for a more democratized democracy, one in which our government takes full advantage of the Networked Age and the vast resources of its citizenry. Highly recommended!”
“I strongly recommend 'Smart Citizens, Smarter State' to the new generation of scientists emerging at the interface of computing and public policy. Those with technology and ‘hard’ sciences backgrounds would hugely benefit from a comprehensive understanding of government and policy domains in order to set new research agendas with significant potential for wider impact. At the other end of the spectrum, those with politics and social science backgrounds would find it very helpful for understanding the current technologies of expertise and the new trends in public decision-making, offering great promise for transforming the ways that governments should operate under the ongoing data revolution.”
"Crowd-sourcing works wonderfully in creating open-source software and online encyclopedias. Can it work in governance? Beth Noveck, who has spent years creating means of engaging citizens on the Internet, argues it can, if done wisely. This book―informed by experience, breathless energy, optimism, encyclopedic knowledge, and an extraordinary intellect―should be required reading for all who are interested in the question.”
“Richly informative, unafraid to address problem areas (transparency and elitism), [Noveck] offers an inspiring prospect of smarter cities in a smarter future.”
“Noveck offers an optimistic but realistic approach that aims to offer a theoretical and practical road map of policy making, champions more than transparent government, and encourages readers to not perceive citizens as mere passive policy bystanders. In a society that facilitates collaboration and allows for political institutions that are open by default, this approach calls for a fundamental transformation of how government engages citizens in policy making.”
“'Smart Citizens, Smarter State' is a manifesto for a new way of governing. Digital technologies, Noveck argues, create abundant opportunities for governments to learn from their citizens and provide better services. Written with optimism and passion, this book brings the open source revolution to public administration.”
“A ringing call to arms for anyone who believes that government is busted and citizens could do more than anyone else to fix it. Following in the footsteps of John Dewey, Noveck explores the fundamental changes needed to bring to bear the vast resource of citizen expertise and ability in a time of rising demands and dwindling resources. The book summons smart citizens everywhere to action, be they makers, hackers, data analysts, or everyday experts. It also challenges members of the existing elite, daring them to imagine a more populist―and smarter―future.”
“The endless debate that assumes ‘expertise’ and ‘democracy’ to be in conflict is here unpacked―and then carefully, intelligently reassembled from the perspective of new tools such as digital data and new ideas, including crowd-sourcing distributed expertise. The result? A false choice is demolished, replaced by a commonsense strategy that welcomes expertise without diminishing democracy’s robustness.”
“The ultimate goal of 'Smart Citizens, Smarter State' is not simply a more competent regulatory state, but a transformed relationship between government and the governed. To policymakers and bureaucrats, Noveck makes the case that soliciting citizen expertise can make governance more effective; to democratic theorists, Noveck argues that providing expertise is a genuine form of civic engagement… The strongest characteristic of 'Smart Citizens, Smarter State' is its intellectually modest approach: It builds on existing programs, can be scaled up quickly or slowly, and is predicated on experimentation rather than centralized decision-making. That makes it a great reform agenda for those who have been burned by sweeping overhauls and grandiose promises before.”
“'Smarter Citizens, Smarter State' is a valuable contribution to a debate that will continue as technology plays an increasing role in almost every aspect our lives.”
