This afternoon in Manhattan, the Markle Foundation hosted Beth Simone Noveck for a coming out party for her new book “Wiki Government,” a work subtitled “How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful.” Noveck, you might know, is now the deputy U.S. CTO for open government. But she was once a law professor, innovating from the outside. Noveck has spent years seeing how what we know about technology can fix what we know is wrong with government. In particularly, Noveck is known for the innovative Peer-to-Patent project. In that experiment, citizen-experts go online to vet applications for software patents. The hope is that doing so helps the notoriously overworked and overwhelmed patent examiners in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can make smarter, faster decisions.
