Beeck Center Georgetown University Beeck Center: Social Impact + Innovation

The Opportunity Project for Cities

Highlights

  • Empowering local government practitioners through human-centered design training to center the voices of affected communities when designing data-driven solutions.
  • Partnering with communities, leveraging data, and using open-source technology to co-create accessible digital tools that address local challenges and improve government services delivery.
  • Building a network of cities equipped to scale and adapt best practices for community-driven innovation, using replicable open-source solutions to benefit local communities and foster broader cultural change within their organizations and beyond.

The Opportunity Project for Cities (TOPC) is a 20-week program designed to help municipalities address local challenges with digital tools. TOPC focuses on three main goals:

 

  • Collaborating with residents to tackle local issues
  • Fostering cross-sector partnerships
  • Enhancing digital innovation capacity

 

TOPC brings together local governments, technologists, and community leaders to co-create digital solutions using human-centered design and open data, addressing residents’ most urgent needs. This approach fosters transparency, accessibility, and responsiveness in government, and strengthens trust with residents and creating a foundation for lasting change.

Since 2016, the federal The Opportunity Project has united public and private sectors to use open data for developing digital solutions to critical socioeconomic and environmental issues. In 2020, the Beeck Center collaborated with the Centre for Public Impact, Google.org, and the Knight Foundation to bring this model to Knight cities.

 

TOPC Partners

 

TOPC’s model is grounded in human-centered design, equity-focused research, and open data—publicly available, machine-readable data—to inform digital solutions that genuinely meet community needs. Community members are positioned as experts and co-creators, not just passive recipients of government services, to ensure their lived experiences shape civic solutions.

Since 2021, TOPC has engaged over 1,800 residents in human-centered design activities, including interviews, focus groups, and user testing. We’ve trained 123 local government staff in research, design, prototyping, and product sustainability, supported by vital community partnerships.

 

TOPC Impact

 

Residents know their communities’ challenges and how to solve them best. TOPC pairs community experts with government teams and pro-bono technologists to create equity-driven, data-informed digital tools for pressing issues like climate resilience, housing evictions, and digital equity.

 

TOPC Cohort Map

Team

  • Harold Moore

    Harold Moore

    Director, The Opportunity Project for Cities

  • Elham Ali

    Elham Ali

    Project Researcher, The Opportunity Project for Cities

Next Project Event

The Opportunity Project for Cities Demo Day 2024

The Opportunity Project for Cities Demo Day 2024
November 14, 2024
1:30 pm

Virtual
Join us for TOPC Demo Day 2024 on November 14, 2024. Learn how governments, community organizations, and Google.org technologists co-created solutions to local challenges using the power of open data and community engagement.
The Opportunity Project for Cities Demo Day 2022

The Opportunity Project for Cities Demo Day 2022
November 15, 2022
1:00 pm

Virtual
The second cohort of The Opportunity Project for Cities partnered local governments and community organizations with pro bono support from technologists at Google.org to co-design new tools, powered by local data.

Project Updates

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Project Reports & Resources

Unemployment Insurance IT Modernization Grant Projects: Insights Report

Unemployment Insurance IT Modernization Grant Projects: Insights Report

This report outlines the evolving experiences and key insights from nine of the 19 states implementing projects supported by $204 million from the U.S. Department of Labor’s (USDOL) Unemployment Insurance (UI) Information Technology (IT) Modernization Grants. The findings reflect the grantees’ learnings since receiving project approval and launching their five-year modernization efforts, providing a snapshot of both the successes and ongoing challenges faced during implementation.

Dec. 12, 2024