Open Opportunities Program

News and Events on Open Opportunities Program

21 posts

Federal Crowdsourcing Webinar Series, Episode 4: Open Opportunities

The Open Opportunities program is a “win-win” for federal employees looking to refresh their skills and U.S. agencies seeking talent, energy, and enthusiasm from across a diverse cross-section of the federal workforce.

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Hosted by Digital.gov and the Challenge.gov

Posts by Lisa Nelson Posts by Tammy White

Jul 09, 2019 2019

DigitalGov University in Review: 2016 Training Trends

Thanks to your participation, DigitalGov University (DGU), the events platform for DigitalGov, hosted over 90 events with 6,648 attendees from over 100 agencies across federal, tribal, state, and local governments.

Posts by Janelle Thalls

Jan 11, 2017

Collaboration and Innovation, Beyond Government Borders

How to start an innovation movement: Connect innovators with fellow innovators, and find more innovators to collaborate with.

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jun 10, 2016

Why People Contribute to Federal Tech Projects (And How You Can Provide a Good Experience)

Author’s note: Anyone can contribute to the development of the Open Opportunities platform via the project’s GitHub repository. The Open Opportunities program itself is only open to federal employees. Open, agile software development projects can improve government initiatives. As discussed in last week’s article on agile projects in government, the Open Opportunities platform has benefited

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jan 14, 2016

Digging Into the Data of Our Customer Survey

As a followup to the recent post about our annual customer satisfaction survey, we wanted to dig into the data and share some of the overall results, to give you some more insights into how we’re using your feedback to improve our programs and services. Background: For the past three years, GSA’s Office of Citizen

Posts by Rachel Flagg

Jan 05, 2016

How Agile Development Can Benefit Federal Projects

Agile methods help agencies deliver projects and products more efficiently and effectively. The benefits aren’t limited to deliverables: Going agile can break down the silos that exist between and within agencies. And collaboration doesn’t need to end at the federal level—agile projects done in the open provide a way for the public to contribute to

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jan 04, 2016

New White House Innovation Strategy Promotes Increase in Challenges and Prizes

The White House released an updated Strategy for American Innovation last week, calling again on government to tap the American public’s brain trust

Posts by Kelly Olson

Oct 29, 2015

Building the Next Generation of Government Innovators

Innovators are made, not born. This summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began cultivating the next generation of federal innovators through a summer incubator boot camp, aimHI. AimHI is a pilot program to get high school students excited about careers in health information technology, medical devices and public service. Instead of traditional internships, which

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Oct 28, 2015

5 Factors to Building a Successful Government-wide Digital Analytics Program

Launched just three years ago, the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) continues to drive the 2012 Digital Government Strategy’s mission to improve the citizen experience by streamlining the collection and analysis of digital analytics data on a federal government-wide scale. The DAP officially launched on October 15, 2012 with a release of its first version of

Posts by Gwynne Kostin Posts by Marina Fox

Oct 20, 2015

How Agencies Can Support Employee Professional Development

Providing professional development for over 100,000 employees is no easy task. To build on the existing skills of their workforce, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has piloted AgOpportunity, a program that matches USDA employees with projects that need their skills and interest. The idea for AgOpportunity came from the Partnership for Public Service’s Excellence

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Oct 09, 2015

How OSTP Crowdsourced A Crowdsourcing Toolkit

To promote crowdsourcing, one effective tool is, well, crowdsourcing. Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) unveiled the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit. The toolkit contains information, resources, and best practices federal agencies can use to harness the power

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Sep 30, 2015

An Overview of Digital Communities

Digital communities of practice come in many stripes. DigitalGov communities span eight (and counting) focus areas and have thousands of members, but strong collaborations exist in all corners of government. In honor of this month’s communities theme, we are offering a list of communities that foster connections and strengthen the digital capabilities of federal agencies.

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jul 31, 2015

What’s in a Name? “Communities” in the Public and Private Sectors

Many of you are part of a government community. We lead a few of them here, and new ones are forming all the time. In fact, as I was writing this article, I stumbled upon a community for government Drupal users. A co-worker recently asked me for research on communities because she is trying to

Posts by Karen Trebon

Jul 15, 2015

Progress with Open Opportunities: Notes from the Field

As a task creator with an ambitious agenda and limited resources, I’ve got a great deal of incentive to make the most use that I can of Open Opportunities. And indeed, Open Opportunities participants have made a concrete and positive difference in the operations of our office, the Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office, part of

Posts by Dannielle Blumenthal

May 01, 2015

Reaching Out To Deliver Within: Crowdsourcing Internal Agency Projects

Crowdsourcing has created new paths for public interaction with the government, as we’ve been highlighting on DigitalGov with this month’s theme. However, crowdsourcing can also be used to harness support for internal agency projects. The Department of State is using crowdsourcing to find talent within and outside of government to support agency activities. Through the

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Dec 19, 2014

Open Opportunities

From Taste-Testers to Explorers: Developing Personas for Open Opportunities

Being customer-focused means doing the gumshoe work of research and rounds of analysis to find gold by understanding user goals. For the task-based innovation network, Open Opportunities for DigitalGov, that meant developing personas in order to overcome our own biases and learn about the different motivations of our participants. In this article, we’ll talk about

Posts by Ashley Wichman Posts by Lisa Nelson

Dec 08, 2014

DigitalGov University is Making Changes Thanks to You

DigitalGov University took the pulse of our participants this spring and found that our audience wants more information about events, wants us to better communicate the value of programs and wants more access to our programs. DigitalGov University (DGU) is a platform for feds to share ideas, experiences and techniques to meet 21st century public

Posts by Alycia Piazza

Nov 07, 2014

Use Metrics to Drive Success

Would federal employees work on tasks outside their agency in order to support DigitalGov? That’s the question we wanted to answer as we created the Open Opportunities program. We had a built-in test case. When the Digital Government Strategy was released in May 2013, agencies were tasked with building APIs, launching mobile products, establishing digital

Posts by Lisa Nelson

Oct 24, 2014

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