Charting a course from virtual reality to the White House

Beth Noveck is President Barack Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government. Precisely what "open government" means probably depends on whom you ask. But in her official role in the current presidential administration, Noveck frames it as an attempt to make our federal institutions embrace technology in a bid to share information with the public. "Open government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent," Noveck explains, "that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory." On January 21, as many in Washington (DC) were still shaking off hangovers from the inaugural parties the night before, Obama, in his first official action as president, signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open government, a short document that declared, "We shall work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government." Noveck was a principal contributor to the memorandum, and the first member of the Obama-Biden transition's Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform team, which advised the president-elect on ways to incorporate technology into his larger reform goals. So one could say that the new president's adoption of these concepts was a very high-profile validation of years of Noveck's work on a wide range of issues revolving around technology policy and using technology to help craft policy.