Open Opportunities is creating a network of federal employees that will lead to a more effective, efficient, responsive government by sharing skills and collaborating on projects that support the mission of an agency or the government as a whole.
OpenOpps is the open source platform that supports the Open Opportunities program. As open source software, it can be deployed by state or local governments or in the private sector. It is free to use by anyone who can has technical operations staff and passion to start a new program, and we welcome everyone who would like to contribute to improving the platform.
Here’s how Open Opportunities works: You come up with a great idea that would help your workplace, but you and your coworkers don’t have the skills to execute it. Rather than bringing in a contractor, you can post your project idea to Open Opportunities, where other people within your organization can see it and then work on it, if they’d like.
Open Opportunities can benefit all organizations, but it’s especially useful for those with distributed teams and whose employees have diverse skill sets. Using Open Opportunities, you and your colleagues can work on projects together, get to know each other better, and develop skills you don’t use as often as you’d like.
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- Use our community test server and write up issues
- Join our Google Group and introduce yourself, please ask any general questions here -- how the product is supposed to work, usability issues, technical questions, whatever you want to know, we want to hear about. If you are interested in using Open Opportunities for your organization, let us know.
- Read our Contribution Guide -- everything you do with us is a contribution to the public domain, there are also some tips for getting started
- If you are a developer, install the software for development
- Dive into our help wanted issues -- there are both dev and design opportunities there
Problem Statement: Our workforce often lacks talent and skills where and when they are needed.
- working across organizational boundaries is difficult
- professional development opportunities are scarce
- only 35% of federal employees believe creativity and innovation are rewarded (2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey)
Solution: provide a software platform that enables a program with very small central staff and program leaders across government that provide professional development opportunities
Our Goal: to foster innovation across team boundaries by connecting individuals who identify challenges and then work collaboratively to implement solutions.
A cross-agency working group meets regularly to discuss program needs. We use an Agile Roadmap where the product team selects features that we believe will meet goals. We strive to make data-driven decisions based on metrics and qualitative user research and to validate the outcomes based on observed community behavior. This is an iterative process.
We also welcome direct participation from government and private sector and are always in need of people who can write documentation or marketing material, visual and UX designers, as well as software coders.
Open Opportunities was initially validated as part of a Digital Government initiative using WordPress and a Lean Startup "concierge" approach. In its initial pilot phase, people from over 50 government agencies, completing over 100 projects, ranging from 1 hour tasks to working part-time for 3-6 months. Open Opportunities moved to this software platform in October 2014, and is now available for all federal employees. The platform was originally developed for foreign service officers the Department of State in 2013 as a Presidential Innovation Fellows project under the code name Midas.
This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
For more information, see license.