Beth Noveck | TechPresident

What the Early 20th Century and the SOPA/PIPA Fight Have In Common

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, September 26 2012

As it happens, there's a connection between the SOPA/PIPA fight and sexuality and politics in 1920s Austria. That's the argument Beth Noveck made Monday at New York Law School, during an evening book event Personal Democracy Media hosted to discuss Steven Johnson's new book, "Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in the Networked Age." Noveck spoke alongside Tina Rosenberg, co-writer of the Fixes online column for the New York Times, Internet thinker Clay Shirky, and our editorial director, Micah Sifry. Read More

Coming Up: "The Rise of the 'Peer Progressive'" Monday 9/24 7pm in NYC

BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, September 19 2012

We're looking forward to this Monday night's conversation on "The Rise of the 'Peer Progressive'" with author Steven Johnson that we're hosting along with NY Law School's Institute of Information Law & Policy. We'll ... Read More

Expert Labs: Putting The 'Public' Into Public Policy Wasn't Easy

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 29 2012

The closing down of an effort known as Expert Labs this month acted as a marker of sorts in the open government movement. Epitomizing the general ethos of the time, here was a group of Internet-famous hipster technologists and personalities who had decided to storm the barricades and focus their collective attention on helping the federal government to break out of the Beltway bubble to connect better with the public when making policy decisions. Why shouldn't the world be excited about what kind of change they could potentially bring about? As the organization closes up shop, here's a look at what it did after launching in 2010. Read More

Beth Noveck's Transparency Suggestions For Bringing Better Data Through the DATA Act

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, July 7 2011

Two competing initiatives from the House of Representatives and White House respectively fall short of their stated goal to increase transparency around government spending, former White House Deputy Chief Technology ... Read More

U.S.'s Noveck to Help Open British Government

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

Photo credit: Joi Ito Beth Noveck, until January the Obama administration's point person on open government, has been recruited to the British government to help in its "open-source policy making" efforts, ... Read More

WeGov

"The Two Tribes of Open Government"?

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 9 2011

The Project on Government Oversight's Danielle Brian takes issue with former White House Deputy CTO Beth Noveck's breaking down of the open government space into "Good government reformers who focus on a certain ... Read More

Why "Open Government" is Terrible Branding (Or, Whatever Happended to Participation and Collaboration?)

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, April 14 2011

Looking back, "open government" was a dumb thing to call the Obama administration's early forays into innovative online work (as in, the White House's "Open Government Initiative") writes Beth Noveck, ... Read More

A Map of the U.S. Open Government World

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 6 2011

GovLoop, GOOD, former U.S. Deputy CTO Beth Noveck, and open gov researcher Angie Newell team up to create a clickable visualization that maps out more than 350 federal open government projects. Read More

Noveck on Lessons Learned

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, March 23 2011

In a 1-2-3-part interview with Asia-based FutureGov, former U.S. Deputy Beth Noveck argues a point that seems to be gaining traction in open government circles: that while the "institutionalization" of open ... Read More

White House Taps Top City CIO to Replace Beth Noveck as Deputy CTO for Innovation

BY Nick Judd | Monday, February 28 2011

Chris Vein, widely known as the groundbreaking chief information officer for the city of San Francisco, has departed for the White House, you may have heard already from Luke Fretwell at Fedscoop. His new title, ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed tuesday >

Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

monday >

Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

friday >

Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

thursday >

U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

wednesday >

New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

Macedonia Draft Law to Regulate and Restrict the "Last Arena for Freedom of Speech"

The draft of a media regulation law in Macedonia has journalists and press freedom watchdogs up in arms. The proposed Law on Media and Audiovisual Media Services was written by the government behind closed doors and without input from the media or NGOs. It has been interpreted as a decisive move on the part of the government to limit speech online in a country where press freedoms are already limited. Until now, Internet-based news sites were not regulated like print media.

Trying to Prosecute Online Piracy in Canada? Good Luck!

A private firm that is monitoring Canadians who download pirated content online has found itself at the center of a legal battle. GO

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