Beth Noveck is director of the US think tank Governance, and she has worked with technology and innovation in the White House under Barack Obama. In her latest book Smart Citizens, Smarter State she explains how a greater fusion of technology and politics can help us on the way towards better governance and more public participation in the political process.
When Beth Simone Noveck arrived to the white house in January 2009 to head up President Obama’s Open Government initiative—an effort set up to apply technology and innovation to try to improve the workings of government—she was full of unfazed enthusiasm.
Noveck served as a volunteer advisor in the Obama election campaign in 2007 and 2008, seeing first hand how social media could help ordinary citizens engage in politics on a national level. And so she believed those same credentials could then be applied when she got a job within government itself.
Pretty quickly, however, Noveck began to see small cracks appear in the system, especially the conservative culture she witnessed inside the corridors of Washington, where any attempt to fuse the traditional rules of government with technological innovation was treated with suspicion.