The Brussels-based citizen engagement company CitizenLab has recruited Beth Simone Noveck, currently New Jersey’s chief innovation officer, director of New York University’s Governance Lab and a veteran of the Obama Administration, as board chair while the company prepares to do more business in the U.S.
As board chair of CitizenLab — not to be confused with the Citizen Lab, a research unit within the University of Toronto focused on security and human rights — Noveck will bring decades of experience in academia and public policy, on both sides of the Atlantic, to bear on helping a European company sell tools for digital democracy to U.S. city governments.
As director and co-founder of The Governance Lab, also known as The GovLab, Noveck oversees a research arm of NYU devoted to making government more open and effective through data and technology. Under the Obama Administration, she served as deputy chief technology officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative, which aimed to make government more transparent, collaborative and digitally accessible to citizens. Former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron also chose Noveck in 2011 to be the country’s senior adviser for open government, and in August 2018 New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy made her the state’s first chief innovation officer.
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