---
id: "virtual-communities:team"
type: "GovLab project team"
title: "The Power of Virtual Communities: Team"
url: "https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/team"
summary: "The authors and advisors of The Power of Virtual Communities."
source: "The GovLab (virtual-communities.thegovlab.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# The Power of Virtual Communities: Team

## James Button

Senior Fellow, The GovLab. Report Author.

James Button has co-written and edited documents for various GovLab projects. He works for the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and the Scanlon Foundation in Melbourne. He is a former journalist and Europe correspondent at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. In 2009 and 2010 he worked in Australia's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, writing speeches for then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, an experience he describes in his book, Speechless: A Year in my Father's Business. He has also written Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong, and has won three Walkley awards for feature writing.

## Dane Gambrell

Associate Fellow, The GovLab. Report Author.

Dane Gambrell is an Associate Fellow at The GovLab. His research focuses on governance innovation, particularly in the areas of collective intelligence and labor law. Dane’s writing on geospatial data ethics has been published by the American Geographical Society and his writing on innovations in lawmaking has been published in The Hill. He is a summa cum laude graduate of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Urban Environments.

## Eric Klinenberg

Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge. Project Advisor.

Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.dge, New York University

## Anita McGahan

University Professor, George E. Connell Chair in Organizations & Society, University of Toronto. Project Advisor.

Anita M. McGahan is University Professor and George E. Connell Chair in Organizations and Society at the University of Toronto. Her primary appointments are at the Rotman School of Management and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.  She is cross-appointed to the Medical School and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health; is Senior Associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard University; is the Chief Economist in the Division of Global Health Innovation at the Massachusetts General Hospital; and is a past President of the Academy of Management.  From 2014 to 2019, she was a faculty member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance.  During her 2010-2015 appointment as the Director of Toronto’s PhD Program and as the Associate Dean of Research, the School’s PhD and research rankings internationally increased from #11 to #4 and #17 to #3, respectively.

McGahan earned both her PhD and Masters at Harvard University in two years. She holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where she received highest academic honors as a Baker Scholar, and a BA from Northwestern University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She also spent several years at both McKinsey & Company and Morgan Stanley & Company and was previously on the faculties of both Harvard Business School and Boston University. She has visited the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the London Business School, the Australian Graduate School of Management, the University of Cambridge, and the Division of Social Medicine and Global Health at Harvard Medical School.

McGahan’s credits include four books and over 150 articles, case studies, notes and other published material on competitive advantage, industry evolution, and global health. Her current research emphasizes entrepreneurship in the public interest and innovative collaboration between public and private organizations.   She is also pursuing a long-standing interest in how firms overcome industry disruption to achieve breakthrough performance.  Her recent work emphasizes innovation in the governance of technology to improve global health.  McGahan has been recognized as a master teacher for her dedication to the success of junior faculty and for her leadership in course development.  In 2010, she was awarded the Academy of Management BPS Division’s Irwin Distinguished Educator Award.  In 2012, the Academy conferred on McGahan its Career Distinguished Educator Award for her championship of reform in the core curriculum of Business Schools.  In 2018, McGahan was awarded both the Inaugural Educational Impact Award and the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize from the Strategic Management Society. In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and in 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

McGahan currently teaches several courses at the University of Toronto: the Strategy core to MBA candidates at the Rotman School of Management; Entrepreneurship in the Physiology Department of the Medical School; and Grand Challenges, which is an interdisciplinary course offered to students in Engineering, Public Health, Medicine, Management, Global Affairs, and Law.  McGahan is also a faculty leader in the REACH program, which is an interdisciplinary program through which students from all over the University study and conduct field research on the challenges of reaching the world’s most vulnerable and distant populations with essential services, such as vaccines, birth registrations, bank accounts, and electricity. In 2019-2020, she will join colleagues in exploring the engagement of University partners from around the world in REACH.

## Beth Simone Noveck

Director, The GovLab, Professor, New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Report Author.

Beth Simone Noveck directs the Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is a Professor in Technology, Culture, and Society and affiliated faculty at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. She is also Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

At the GovLab, she directs better governance programs, including work with public institutions on public engagement in lawmaking (CrowdLaw), expert-sourcing innovative solutions to hard problems (Smarter Crowdsourcing), co-creation between cities and citizens (City Challenges). She also coaches public problem solvers, working with passionate individuals to take their public interest projects from idea to implementation.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she is a member of the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress and the EPSRC Centre for the Mathematics of Precision Healthcare. Beth also serves on the International Advisory Board of the NHS Digital Academy and the Yankelovich Democracy Monitor as well as a member of the Inter-American Development Bank President’s Commission on Transparency and Corruption and the Global Future Council on Technology, Values and Policy for the World Economic Forum. She is a member of the Steering Committee for the Collective Intelligence Conferences and GIGAPP (Grupo de Investigación en Gobierno, Administracion y Politicas Publicas). She is co-editor of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Government Research and Practice journal and a founding associate editor of the Journal of Collective Intelligence.

In 2018, Beth was awarded a Robert Schumann Fellowship at the European University Institute and a Richard von Weizsaecker Fellowship by the Robert Bosch Foundation. Beth was named one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government 2018” by Apolitical. Previously, she was selected as one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy as well as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company and “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post.

Beth is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005). Her next book, Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World will appear with Yale Press in 2021. Her TED talk is here. She tweets @bethnoveck.

## Lex Paulson

Executive Director, UM6P School of Collective Intelligence. Report Author.

Lex Paulson is an attorney, professor, writer, and consultant in international governance, most recently for UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, and the Corporation for International Private Enterprise. Trained in political theory at Yale, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne, he served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress, organized on four U.S. presidential campaigns, and has additionally worked as a volunteer attorney for Lawyers for Children America. His work as a facilitator and trainer in the international arena include work with NGOs and governments in India, Egypt, Uganda, Burundi, Niger, Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire, on issues related to democratic engagement and accountable government.

## Paolo Spada

Lecturer, Centre for Democratic Futures, University of Southampton. Report Author.

My work investigates how and when these processes reshape political representation, promote accountability, and affect the planning and delivery of public policies. Specific questions that I address include: what are some of the most promising innovations? What drives such innovations: why do some but not all political actors champion them? How do these new participatory spaces transform citizen engagement? How do participatory processes impact public policies and pre-existing political structures? When do local conditions promote/hinder the adoption and impact of democratic innovations? What designs respond better to specific local conditions? How can we better leverage collective intelligence to generate better decisions? How can we scale up deliberation online and offline? How can we integrate multiple participatory processes in a coherent system?

I began my work during my PhD in political science at Yale University when I conducted fieldwork in Brazil studying participatory budgeting, at the same time I completed my PhD in Economics. This dual training motivates me to combine multiple research methodologies rooted in different traditions. During my Postdoc at the Ash Centre For Democratic Governance and Innovation (Harvard Kennedy School) I got interested in Civic Technology, interest that was further developed in large grant based research projects in Canada (Participedia), UK (Democracy Matters) and Portugal (EMPATIA).

## Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

Professor, NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Report Author.

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian is a Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. His research interests are in the areas of networked systems, machine learning and AI/ML for health, sustainability and socio-economic development. He leads the Open Networks and Big Data Lab and is a member of the NYU Systems group. He is associated with the Center for Technology and Economic Development, Center for Data Science and NYU WIRELESS.

He is a Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Entrupy Inc, a startup that uses machine vision algorithms and microscopy to authenticate physical goods and enable trustworthy commerce. He is the Co-Founder of Gaius Networks , a startup aiming to build a new hyperlocal mobile web for the next billion users in emerging markets.