Articles by

Beth Simone Noveck

  • Article

    From idea to implementation, GovLab programs develop skills to make communities better

    Published March 3, 2015 by

    The Gov Lab Experiment by Paloma Baytelman on Flickr. Beth Noveck is founder and CEO of The Governance Lab at New York University, which Knight Foundation supports to promote civic engagement. The Governance Lab Academy, a training program designed to promote civic engagement and innovation, is launching a series of coaching programs with the support of Knight Foundation. The sessions are designed to help participants working in civic engagement and innovation develop effective projects from idea to implementation. They are geared to the teams and individuals inside and outside of government planning to undertake a new project or trying to figure out how to make an existing project even more effective and scalable. Special preference is being given to teams comprised of officials from U.S. cities or working on city-level problems and opportunities.
  • Article

    No taxation without participation: Making governments more open and accountable

    Published April 18, 2013 by

    Today and tomorrow in New York, the Knight-funded Governance Lab @ NYU is hosting Making Engagment Work 'Experiment,' where participants will look at ways to make institutions more open and agile. Here, Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan G. Verhulst highlight some of the topics being discussed. Government was on everyone’s mind this week, and not in a good way. A Pew survey shows that the majority of Americans dislikes or hates doing taxes, calling it time consuming and stressful. That’s not suprising, given that the Internal Revenue Service’s website features more than 400 tax forms to download. RELATED LINKs  "Gov Lab's 'Experiment' brainstorms ways to make engagement work" by Elizabeth Miller on KnightBlog "GovLab @ NYU 'Experiment' goes from awkward to exceptional" by Damian Thorman on Knight Blog It’s not just the complexity of the tax filing process that makes it painful; it’s the missed opportunity for participation. The tax system’s design dates back to a time when the centralization of information collection and decision-making was viewed as necessary.  Yet even today, besides voting in annual elections, people have almost no way to direct how government spends their money. There is still no feedback mechanism for citizens to share —in real time or at tax time — how their contribution might help provide public goods or solve societal challenges. Governments, too, miss out on citizens’ expertise. How can we re-imagine how we collect and decide how to spend taxes, and by doing so, make government more effective and accountable? Moreover, how can these lessons strengthen the relation between, and among, citizens and the governance institutions? These are the kinds of questions we are seeking to start answering at the GovLab ‘Experiment’ a two-day event where participants work together to identify and overcome the impediments that limit citizen engagement and prevent more open and agile institutions. The GovLab is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and housed at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Here’s where we are starting the conversation: