Welcome 👋🏽

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

TOPC brings together local governments, technologists, and community leaders to co-create digital solutions using human-centered design and open data—publicly available, machine-readable data— addressing residents’ most urgent needs.

TOPC is inspired by the federal The Opportunity Project, which 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 for Social Impact and Innovation collaborated with the Centre for Public Impact, Google.org, and the Knight Foundation to bring this model to Knight cities.

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Templates & Guides

Templates designed for human-centered design processes, covering everything from problem definition, research plans, usability testing facilitator guides, systems thinking, to product roadmapping. TOPC participants adapted these templates to address community challenges in their local contexts.

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EXPLORE

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Learning Labs

Monthly workshops brought together the entire TOPC cohort to tackle common challenges in community co-design projects. Labs focus on actionable best practices shared by practitioners and experts, while fireside chats feature guest speakers—TOPC alumni, city officials, community organizations, and technologists—sharing their insights and experiences to foster collaboration and innovation.

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ENGAGE

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Challenges & Solutions

Explore a comprehensive list of participating local governments and their community partners, categorized by their unique local challenges and the digital tools they’ve developed during their TOPC journey. From wireframes to live products, these solutions offer scalable, sustainable approaches to addressing community needs.

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DISCOVER

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News Stories

Featured media of TOPC from impactful stories to thought leadership articles, including how local governments and their communities are transforming local problems with participatory design.

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READ

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Our Impact

A snapshot of TOPC’s impact: residents reached, cities and counties involved, as well as departments and organizations collaborated. Real data highlighting the scope and scale of our work.

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VIEW

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