The White House has unveiled 29 new digital tools from nonprofit organizations, companies and students that support national priorities as part of President Barack Obama’s Opportunity Project.The tools use federal and local data to address challenges identified by the departments of Labor, Transportation, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and the Office of the Surgeon General, the White House said Thursday.
Organizations such as Great Schools, the University of Oregon, MapBox, Airbnb and FitBit collaborated with community members to create tools that aim to tackle issues such as unemployment, transit accessibility and quality of schoolsd.
The Education Department released the Civil Rights Data Collection Application Program Interfaces to provide users federal data on civil rights and course access, while DOL launched the OpenSkills API that features jobs, skills, training and wage data.
The White House also called on the public to develop new tools, offer data sources and invent ways to use open data to support communities.
The Commerce Department will lead the Opportunity Project and collaborate with other federal agencies to form data sets and establish core national priorities that will involve the technology sector’s input.
The Census Bureau updated opportunity.census.gov to help software developers, universities and community partners to access project data and existing tools as well as build new tools and form collaborations.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will share data, maps and code behind NOAA’s Climate Resilience Toolkit through the Opportunity Project.
The Opportunity Project launched in March 2016 with the goal to encourage the creation digital tools to aid the needs of communities through open data.
