A Rotary scholar uses technology as a force for good
Like so many, Beth Simone Noveck found her mind swirling with questions during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Was it safe to go outside? If she got food delivered, would she need to wipe down the packaging? Was she a bad mother for wearing pajamas all day or repeatedly feeding her son cereal for dinner? “Everyone, of every religion, class, and country, faced this incredible challenge,” she remembers. “There was a feeling of helplessness.”
In the midst of the uncertainty, Noveck drew on her twin interests in technology and government, cultivated during her time as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. As the chief innovation officer for the state of New Jersey at the time, she and her team quickly built a website with centralized COVID-19 information, a symptom tracker, an online form that inventoried supplies of medical and personal protective equipment, and another that coordinated donations of that equipment.
“It’s a core value of Rotary,” she says, “that people come together to serve their community, and that by working in groups you don’t have to be a superhero to do extraordinary things. As difficult as COVID was, and as much as I regret feeding my child cereal so often, I felt good that I could be useful and act.”
Beth Simone Noveck is in awe of the Rotary members who made it possible to attend Oxford. “I am so grateful,” she says.
Courtesy of Northeastern University
Noveck grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, on a former chicken farm that her mother’s parents, refugees from Germany, started in 1937. She recalls a childhood of cats and trees and bare feet in the dirt, the earthy smells of cut grass and damp soil, picking flowers and canning vegetables. The chickens were gone by then, but her family still grew vegetables for themselves and to sell. “At age 4, I was made the VP of a business called the Greener Thumb,” she says, “which meant sitting on the front lawn and selling tomatoes.”
She learned early on about technology. Her father, a rabbi, was retired, so her mother became the principal earner, not only selling vegetables but trading stocks preinternet. Noveck grew up with the mechanical click-clack of a ticker-tape machine. Her mother then started a travel agency and in 1982 brought home a magical new thing called an IBM personal computer. Thus began Noveck’s love of technology, which she has melded into her other interests ever since.
That computer, Noveck says, “enabled my mother to raise two kids, cook three meals a day, earn a living, and also engage with the wider world far beyond where we lived. So in my experience it was a significant tool of empowerment.”
Noveck’s grandfather was a Rotarian. In college at Harvard, she heard about and applied for an “extraordinarily generous” Rotary Foundation scholarship to study abroad for a year, which she says was “so formative for my career and the work I do.”
The scholarship sent her to the University of Oxford in England in 1992, and she studied political science and democratic theory. She remembers great discussions and making friends from around the world with whom she remains close.
Noveck is still in awe of the many Rotary members whose contributions made her experience possible. “I went to college on a scholarship and could never have afforded Oxford, so this kind of experience for a whole year allowed me to really go in-depth into the work I started there,” she says. “My historical study of Germany and Austria in the 1920s and ’30s allowed me to investigate why some countries are able to maintain democracy, and why others crumble into fascism.”
Beth Simone Noveck
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, University of Oxford, 1992-93; PhD, University of Innsbruck, 1994; law degree, Yale University, 1997
- Deputy chief technology officer and White House Open Government Initiative director, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2009-11
- Professor, director of the Burnes Center for Social Change, and director of the Governance Lab, Northeastern University, 2021-present
After Oxford, Noveck earned a PhD at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a law degree at Yale. She clerked for a year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, while also managing the team that built a software program called Unchat, which promoted “democratic deliberation and distance learning.”
For two years she served in the White House under President Barack Obama, leading the White House Open Government Initiative to make the government more transparent and participatory. She has published three books and numerous articles, and she’s had professorial stints at Yale, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She is now a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change as well as the Governance Lab.
Noveck points out that trust in government has dropped precipitously over the decades since President Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” She says that government can use new technologies, including artificial intelligence, to improve its responsiveness to people’s needs. She ticks off successful examples: programs and apps that have streamlined food-assistance applications, eased job searches, and reduced cardiac deaths by alerting people trained in CPR to a cardiac emergency nearby.
Much of her current work involves teaching young people skills to use technology to improve the world. Her former students have created apps that helped people experiencing domestic abuse and taught information technology job skills to refugees. As Noveck said in a TED Talk, “When we start by teaching young people that ... we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that’s when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards ... this open government revolution.”
“I am so grateful to Rotary for their support,” she says. “It provided me with opportunities, new vistas, a sense of purpose, and an ethos of service. It was extraordinary.”
This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.