The Opportunity Project: 10 Years of Open Data and Agile Development : IBM Center for The Business of Government , July 22 , 2025
The Opportunity Project: 10 Years of Open Data and Agile Development : IBM Center for The Business of Government , July 22 , 2025
From the document: "In 2025, The Opportunity Project (TOP), a program of the Census Open Innovation Labs (COIL) at the U.S. Census Bureau, marks its 10th year. Over the past decade TOP has engaged “technologists, government, and communities to prototype digital products that solve real-world problems with open data.” TOP has run 79 technology development sprints to produce some 258 digital products drawing on more than 450 datasets. Most of these products are available at the program’s website.
In 2018, the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) closely followed several TOP sprints to understand the program’s methodology and analyze the value of agile development and open data for improved government operations and public private collaboration. The result was a 2019 report for the IBM Center for The Business of Government, Agile Problem Solving in Government: A Case Study of the Opportunity Project.
Now, for the 10th year of TOP, CODE has worked with TOP leadership and participants to look back across the last decade, analyze how TOP’s methodology has evolved, and identify lessons learned for the future of the program. This new report includes four brief case studies, drawing on interviews with TOP participants and a review of program documents, that reflect TOP’s value.
TOP has had a strong positive impact with participants from other federal agencies, companies, NGOs, academic institutions, communities, and individual tech volunteers. The program has educated a new generation of open government data users, kickstarted ongoing collaborations between government agencies and their stakeholders, built more reciprocal and less extractive relationships between government data stewards and communities, made it easier to access and use large government data assets, improved data discoverability and accessibility, enhanced usability, and helped commercial organizations support positive change with open data."
Authors - Gurin, Joel, Rumsey, MattSubjects
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