How can our data strengthen our democracies? In her work, Beth Noveck explores what "opengov" really means--not just freeing data from databases, but creating meaningful ways for citizens to collaborate with their governments.

As the US's first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration. Among other projects, she designed and built Peer-to-Patent, the U.S. government’s first expert network. She's now working on the design for ORGPedia, a platform for mashing up and visualizing public and crowdsourced data about corporations. Her book The Networked State will appear in 2013.

Must-read: Noveck's 2012 essay Open Data -- The Democratic Imperative.