Reviews

• Smart Citizens, Smarter State is a manifesto for a new way of governing. Digital technologies, Beth Noveck argues, create abundant opportunities for governments to learn from their citizens and provide better services. Written with optimism and passion, this book brings the open source revolution to public administration.

  –Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School.
  

• Smarter Citizens, Smarter State is a valuable contribution to a debate that will continue as technology plays an increasing role in almost every aspect our lives.

  –J. P. O’Malley, New Internationalist

• A ringing call to arms for anyone who believes that government is busted and citizens could do more than anyone else to fix it. Following in the footsteps of John Dewey, Noveck explores the fundamental changes needed to bring to bear the vast resource of citizen expertise and ability in a time of rising demands and dwindling resources. The book summons smart citizens everywhere to action, be they makers, hackers, data analysts, or everyday experts. It also challenges members of the existing elite, daring them to imagine a more populist—and smarter—future.

  -Paul W. Glimcher, Julius Silver Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, and Economics and Director of the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision-Making, New York University

• New peer-to-peer technology platforms have radically democratized how information spreads, how capital flows, and even how cabs get hailed in the twenty-first century. But our government itself remains a largely closed system, with relatively few opportunities for public engagement and collaboration. In this book, Beth Simone Noveck lays out a fresh and ambitious vision for a more democratized democracy, one in which our government takes full advantage of the Networked Age and the vast resources of its citizenry. Highly recommended!

  -Reid Hoffman, cofounder/chairman of LinkedIn and coauthor of The alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

• Crowd-sourcing works wonderfully in creating open-source software and online encyclopedias. Can it work in governance? Beth Noveck, who has spent years creating means of engaging citizens on the Internet, argues it can, if done wisely. This book—informed by experience, breathless energy, optimism, encyclopedic knowledge, and an extraordinary intellect—should be required reading for all who are interested in the question.

  -Peter L. Strauss, Betts Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

• The endless debate that assumes ‘expertise’ and ‘democracy’ to be in conflict is here unpacked—and then carefully, intelligently reassembled from the perspective of new tools such as digital data and new ideas, including crowd-sourcing distributed expertise. The result? A false choice is demolished, replaced by a commonsense strategy that welcomes expertise without diminishing democracy’s robustness.

  -Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Social Affairs, Columbia University

• As government agencies review how to solicit and shape public knowledge, they must also rethink what, exactly, sets the credentialed experts apart. Noveck identifies substantial potential for change in this area and encourages public thinkers and officials to be more nimble, efficient, and inclusive in their views of what constitutes knowledge. If we are serious about building a genuinely democratic community of knowledge-makers, we ought to take her recommendations to heart.

  -Stephen Goldsmith, Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)

• Though they come from radically opposed positions, Smart Citizens by Beth Simone Noveck and Exposed by Bernard Harcourt shed much light on the balance of state, market and social power in the network age. As an academic who was an early member of Obama’s 2008 back-room staff, Noveck has a sharp take on the current sclerosis of policy-making. You couldn’t imagine two responses to a smarter state more at odds conceptually. Yet each is plausible in its way. Together, they leave us smarter and sharper about being a digital citizen.

  -Pat Kane, New Scientist magazine

• Beth’s book, and the work it reflects from The GovLab in New York, is some the best thinking I’ve seen about not just new practices for more effective governance and better quality public work but about the requisite shift of culture and mindset without which many of these promising “lines of inquiry” for impact and results will go begging.

  –Martin Stewart-Weeks, Public Purpose

• The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing, Noveck says that while government today gets expertise from many sources, “it is often difficult to find the right expertise quickly enough and early enough”.

  –Suzannah Brecknell, in Civil Service World, “What can Barack Obama’s digital adviser teach the civil service about talent hunting?” , March 2016

• The book promotes a re-appreciation of the role of the citizen, reintroducing the humanist ideal of the French and American revolutionary ideologies of the late eighteenth century. And this is done from a suitably updated position, from the idea that we should govern not just “for” the citizens, but rather “with” the citizens. However, far from presenting a romantic justification, the truth is that there is a purely pragmatic underlying view: who better than the citizen himself to complete, promote and enhance government action? Is not he the receiver/ultimate consumer of public services? And, moreover, what motivation could maintain the existence of expert knowledge solely in the hands of a few?

  -Jordi Romeu-Granados, Instituto Universitario de Investigación Ortega y Gasset

   

• Smart Citizens, Smarter State to the new generation of scientists emerging at the interface of computing and public policy. Those with technology and ‘hard’ sciences backgrounds would hugely benefit from a comprehensive understanding of government and policy domains in order to set new research agendas with significant potential for wider impact. At the other end of the spectrum, those with politics and social science backgrounds would find it very helpful for understanding the current technologies of expertise and the new trends in public decision-making, offering great promise for transforming the ways that governments should operate under the ongoing data revolution.

  – Zeynep Engin, Founder and Lead Investigator of Data for Policy

• Noveck lays out the concept of “technologies of expertise,” which go beyond the platforms that allow governments to communicate back-and-forth digitally with citizens and into models that help government officials not only find specific types of experts, but also proof and demonstration that those people actually do possess the expertise they claim

  -Nicholas Charney, Book Review- “Impossible Conversations”

• Noveck’s treatment of her subject is nuanced, grounded in historical analysis, practical experience in government, multiple disciplines and a close reading of democratic and institutional theory….Everyone interested in the intersection of social networking, government bureaucracies, and public problem solving…will benefit from the spotlight she shines on this emerging area of governance theory and practice.

  – Scott A. Fritzen, Associate Professor, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington. 

If only…