The Opportunity Project (TOP), a program based within the U.S. Census Bureau, facilitates 10-week sprints in which tech teams from industry and universities build consumer-facing digital products that leverage open data to address some of the biggest national problems.
The university sprint will run September – November 2023, during which university-based technologists from data science and computer science courses, innovation programs, and student organizations will develop digital products using federal open data. This year, we will be partnering with the Census Bureau team to run a university sprint focused on improving access to electrical power for climate resilience. Attached please find an overview document about The Opportunity Project, timeline, and ways for universities to engage, as well as the Problem Statement with information on the motivation of this sprint.
We are recruiting for three sprint roles:
- University tech teams: University tech teams, typically made up of an advisor with up to five students, build digital products in the sprints. They design, develop, and launch the products they build. They collaborate with other sprint participants including government data experts to explore and use available data sets, user advocates to understand user needs, and mentors to develop a post-sprint product strategy.
- User advocates: User advocates are community leaders, advocates, and people with direct lived experience in the target challenges. Their role is to guide teams in designing solutions that are realistic and useful for communities. User advocates communicate the needs, concerns, and realities of the communities they belong to or work with closely, ensuring that the perspective of end users drives how product teams solve problems. Being a user advocate can be a very lightweight time commitment. Depending on their availability, user advocates can expect to spend 1-3 hours per week working alongside product teams and other sprint participants.
- Mentors: We match each university team with a private sector tech partner, who acts as a sponsor, collaborator, and advisor. Through this effort, each private sector company or organization mentors a student team through the process of developing a tool as part of a TOP sprint, while providing mentorship and career development opportunities to the students. The time commitment for mentors will be 1-3 hours per week.
To learn more about the university tech team, user advocate, or mentor roles, please fill out this form.
For more information on other TOP opportunities, visit:https://opportunity.census.gov/